retail

Voice AI is quietly rolling out across US fast-food drive-thrus, with chains like Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, and White Castle scaling up automated ordering after years of testing.

Decathlon Germany has added the Wero European payment scheme to decathlon.de, enabling direct bank-account payments with lower processing costs and loyalty integration, with plans to expand to physical stores.

The paper proposes a Predict-then-Correct (PtC) framework using a few-shot continuous contextual bandit to adaptively correct base ML forecasts in retail demand forecasting, achieving significant improvements in error metrics and inventory costs over baselines.

This paper introduces a training-time stability regularization penalty to improve forecast stability without sacrificing accuracy, evaluated on M5 retail demand data, showing improvements in Forecast Stability Score while maintaining RMSE within 0.72%.

Sheetz is migrating 11,000 virtual machines off VMware to StorMagic's SvHCI, citing uncertainty and cost increases caused by Broadcom's acquisition. The migration spans 838 stores and highlights a broader trend of enterprises leaving VMware.

This paper introduces GenAI Evaluation, a governed and configuration-driven pipeline for scalable multi-dimensional evaluation of retail conversational agents. It achieves high accuracy using LLM-as-a-judge scoring with selective re-evaluation, validated against human-labeled data.

This paper presents the Large Behavioral Model (LBM), which learns customer decision-making from retail transactions using a Person–Environment formulation, retrieval-augmented generation, and reinforcement learning. It outperforms frontier LLMs on retail tasks and shows strong zero-shot transfer.

An analysis comparing Costco's limited-assortment, in-store retail model to Amazon's e-commerce dominance, arguing that consumer desire for less choice and social shopping experiences makes Costco a successful counterpoint to Amazon.

Sony will stop producing physical game discs for PlayStation by 2028, drawing backlash from retailers, preservationists, and boutique publishers who warn of negative impacts on ownership, resale, and game preservation.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping retail by embedding intelligence into decision-making processes such as search, inventory management, and customer engagement. Macy's adopts an 'AI-first' approach, integrating AI into systems to personalize experiences and improve operational efficiency.

Valve is discontinuing its physical Steam gift card program due to widespread scammers, ending its last link to brick-and-mortar retail despite the significant revenue from physical cards.

Amazon's Prime Day 2026 will run from June 23rd to June 27th, featuring member-exclusive deals and early discounts on its own tech products like eero and Kindle.

This paper evaluates traditional machine learning techniques (Random Forests, XGBoost, SVM) against a deep learning model (Unified Multi-Task Time Series Model) for customer churn prediction in retail, finding that conventional methods can outperform in predictive performance and efficiency.

DICK'S Sporting Goods announced an AI-powered chatbot, 'Coach by DICK'S,' integrated into its mobile app to offer product recommendations and training advice.

OpenAI is launching an enhanced visual shopping experience in ChatGPT, expanding its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to support product discovery with major retailers like Target, Sephora, and Best Buy already integrated. The update allows users to browse products visually, compare options side-by-side, and get up-to-date pricing and reviews—rolling out to all free and paid ChatGPT users this week.

Neuro Gum, a nine-figure consumer goods brand, leverages ChatGPT Business to streamline operations across legal, marketing, and supply chain management, enabling a lean 70-person team to compete at national scale with placement in CVS stores nationwide.

Zalando partnered with OpenAI to upgrade its AI-powered shopping assistant from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o mini, achieving a 23% increase in product clicks and 40%+ increase in wishlist additions while expanding to 25 markets with improved multilingual support and instruction-following capabilities.

Loblaw, using AI tools such as ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex, has reduced work that previously took teams weeks or even months to just minutes or hours, significantly improving e-commerce efficiency and product display capabilities.

NOBULL announces an exclusive retail partnership offering Public Rec pants only through its channels, alongside promotional discounts on nutrition electrolytes and footwear.