By: Jim Roddy, President & CEO at the RSPA
On my flight to NRF’s 2026 Big Show, held Jan. 11-13 in New York City, I began reading the book Distracted which included a sentence that jumped out to me because it reflects what I’ve heard from frustrated retail VARs and ISVs about AI and other cutting-edge technologies.
We don’t need more information; we need more examples.
So I will share here as many helpful examples and case studies as I can from the NRF show, RETHINK Retail’s Jan. 12 AiR (AI in Retail) Conference, and other sources I’ve been exposed to across the past few days.
4 Key Retail IT Channel Trends from NRF 2026
Before we get to the war stories, I’m compelled to communicate to you first the top retail IT channel trends I gleaned during my travels. They will provide important context for the forthcoming examples.
- Accessible AI: What’s hot? Achieving outcomes for merchants. What’s not? AI for the sake of AI. There was far less AI hype from NRF exhibitors this year and more what I would call accessible AI. Instead of shouting “AI will change the world!”, exhibitors instead touted improved outcomes as a result of AI and other technologies. Simple, easy-to-comprehend, tangible improved outcomes.
- Micro-Applications: Tying in with that trend, fewer vendors hyped game-changing technologies and focused more on incremental improvements to key areas for merchants such as customer experience, revenue, and labor.
- Strong Growth Expectations: In December, RSPA hosted a focus group in which every participating VAR, ISV, and vendor projected growth in 2026; two-thirds said strong growth while the remaining third expected moderate growth. I stress-tested that prediction visiting 40+ booths at NRF, and every exhibitor I asked agreed 2026 should be a strong year for their org. Not one company was pessimistic about the year ahead.
- Undaunted by Uncertainty: Perhaps the most mentioned word last year in the retail IT channel was “uncertainty,” mainly driven by capricious tariffs and their ripple effects on product pricing and availability. Many organizations – both merchants and IT solution providers – froze for much of 2025, hoping the moment would pass. But uncertainty is expected to be the norm for the foreseeable future, so most everyone is going to buckle up and move forward as best they can.
My analogy for that final point is based on my experience living the first 52 years of my life in Erie, PA, the heart of America’s snow belt, and the last 3+ in Raleigh, NC, where the reaction to snow is akin to radioactive waste falling on your head.
In Erie, you knew it wasn’t going to stop snowing and you had to get to work, school, or the store, so you figured out how to drive in the snow. It didn’t matter if the municipal snowplows had cleared your street yet; you bundled up, dug out your vehicle, and got where you needed to go, just a bit slower than normal.
In Raleigh, schools and businesses shut down for days after the slightest snow accumulation. But if they knew it was going to snow pretty much every day for the next five months, they’d figure out how to cope. It wouldn’t be pretty at first, but it’s more productive than hiding in your basement waiting for a thaw that’s not coming for a while.
********
Take off your winter boots and put on some comfortable shoes now because you’re going to follow me around the NRF expo hall for my three-day, 10-zillion step quest for AI and other cutting-edge technology examples and insights to share with RSPA members.
(Note: This is only a sampling of my too-many-to-count conversations in New York. And I apologize to the RSPA members I talked with who are not mentioned here. Rest assured I love you all.)
Sunday, Jan. 11 – 10:54 AM: Gerson Cedillos at VAR PLS shows me the AI sales assistant that’s part of a digital signage solution they’re reselling. The software helps both employees and associates find products faster both in-store and online. Stressing the importance of showing real-world applications, Cedillos tells me, “We can’t have just hardware in our booth anymore.”
11:52 AM: The booth says “Pomeroy,” a well-known and highly respected retail IT solution provider, but Don Gusse tells me one of the company’s top goals at the show is introducing partners and customers to Daitrix, Pomeroy’s sister company with a sole focus on AI. “AI is a natural evolution of data analytics,” he says.
3:21 PM: With the name Coastal Pay, you would think President Travis Chrisman might want to talk to attendees only about payments, but his show focus is understanding AI integrations with payments and other retail tech. He shows me photos of himself in outfits he would consider buying at a clothing store – sharp, realistic, on-demand, AI-generated photos that would assuredly advance the buying process. His colleague and I encourage him to buy both outfits (and all three of us agree the satchel should be ditched). “AI will revolutionize every aspect of retail,” Chrisman says.
4:07 PM: Wow – the Buffalo Bills score a late touchdown on a quarterback sneak and then intercept a deflected pass to complete their NFL playoff rally vs. the Jacksonville Jaguars, 27-24. Sorry for the digression, but a digital signage vendor was showing the game in their booth, and I can take a quick break, right?
Monday, Jan. 12 – 9:46 AM: The always friendly team at apg talks both cash and AI with me, but they lead with the outcome: AI helps with loss prevention. apg is working with several AI ISVs about building cash handling solutions that improve security for cash-heavy verticals like bars, tobacco, and small restaurants.
11:03 AM: Michael Hess at Accuvia Software also highlights how AI helps with loss prevention but from the angle of video analytics. He also mentions that AI data analytics has been a major focus for the solution provider in 2025 and will be again in 2026. He emphasizes that the key to a successful AI deployment is to always think from the customer perspective. “Some AI I’ve seen is a solution looking for a problem,” he says.
1:35 PM: At the booth of RSPA member CDW, I listen in on a presentation moderated by channel veteran Andy Szanger. The line that jumps out to me is, “What are the customer experiences you’re trying to achieve? Start there with AI.”
2:22 PM: I meet for the first time in person Oren Paran, Managing Director of the Retail Innovation Club, a group of Israel-based retail tech startups, most of them ISVs. Oren introduces me to Yani Engel of PaperWeight AI which has developed an AI-powered smart-shelf solution that predicts shelf behavior, flags unusual events, and provides operational improvements through data. The core of the solution is a paper-based sensor that lasts an estimated two years on product shelves.
3:22 PM: An informal RSPA Meetup outside the Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions booth brings together a couple dozen members, and the conversation soon turns to AI. Aidan Chau of Maple and Arnav Kaushik of Quantic discuss the ISV-to-ISV partnership they’ve forged. Maple’s 24/7 AI phone agent has been integrated with Quantic to capture every order, reservation, and guest question over the phone. Every incoming call is immediately handled by a voice agent that accurately takes orders, books reservations, and syncs directly into Quantic and kitchen display systems. (Read more about the Maple/Quantic solution here.)
5:22 PM: RETHINK Retail’s AiR (AI in Retail) event attracted about 200 retail IT experts to a venue a few blocks away from NRF. An insightful AiR panel was “The Agentic Store: AI-Enabled Retail in Action” featuring Detria Courtalis, VP of US Sales for Pandora, and Shirley Gao, Chief Digital and Information Officer at PacSun.
- Pandora has developed an AI-based product identification system called Charm Finder to help associates locate products faster. In the past, inventory was cataloged in binders full of bar codes that associates would flip through to help customers. Launched in October, Charm Finder is accessed through a mobile POS device equipped with a camera to take a photo of the charm which then shows options related to the design. Courtalis said Pandora’s customer engagement was way up (while binder engagement was way down), and associate training time on inventory has sharply decreased.
- With the goal of extending transactions to become customer engagements, PacSun launched an instant checkout powered by AI. They saw an increase in customer service and sales revenue because associates are freed of the burden of a time-consuming checkout process.
- PacSun uses AI to provide answers to associate questions, reducing the number of calls to managers and reducing time searching policies for answers. “We say, ‘your smartest co-worker is in your back pocket,’” Gao said.
Tuesday, Jan. 13 – 8:54 AM: Best-selling author and business trendsetter Gary Vaynerchuk offered excellent insights for leaders during his Day 3 keynote at NRF. Among his top quotes:
- On AI: “New technologies are often demonized in their early stages. Electricity was demonized; people back then were big on candles. We’ve navigated the atomic bomb invention. I think we will navigate the invention of AI.”
- “Our whole industry is based on fake reports. Show me a report on how much you love your mom. We’re trying to measure things like brand loyalty that can’t be measured.”
- “Relevance leads to loyalty. Customers go from interested to friend to family, then you’re into real brand loyalty. We are in relevance warfare right now.”
(Note: Vaynerchuk’s book Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence – and How You Can, Too is featured on my updated Roddy’s Recommended Reading for SMB Executives list.)
9:25 AM: Elo’s Luke Wilwerding shows me two AI-powered applications, one a self-checkout solution that’s easy for ISVs to integrate with, the other a smart speaker/agent designed for an auto parts chain. Many customers (myself included) enter an auto parts store uncertain what part or product is needed. The smart speaker is an AI agent that will ask you questions about your vehicle situation and answer with relevant product details for your make and model. The agent improves the customer experience because it knows what’s in stock both in store and online and by accelerating the check-in process for more complex customer needs. It can also detect customer frustration and direct you to an employee who’s more likely available for a conversation because the AI agent has freed them from lower-level customer needs. “We want to help resellers drive the AI world with technology they can sell today,” Wilwerding says.
11:37 AM: I catch longtime RSPA member Debi Besmer just before she leaves her Havis booth, and I’m glad I did. I receive a demo for an AI-powered, scale-integrated self-checkout system that uses a camera for object recognition. Not only does it recognize the product without the customer entering a product code (e.g. bananas vs. pomegranates), it identifies the quantity of the product and performs a quality check to ensure the produce is fresh.
12:59 PM: Ken Schember and Anthony Davis of Verifone say among the biggest impact they’re seeing from AI is enhancing the software developer experience and accelerating speed to market for ISVs. Verifone hosted an AI-fueled code-a-thon which produced in just three days (instead of six months) an alternative payments application.
2:27 PM ET: An ESPN alert on my phone says that longtime Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has stepped down after 19 seasons – wow! Sorry for another football digression, but we already established I can take a quick break occasionally. And I’m from Western Pennsylvania where big Steelers news takes precedence over everything, including births, weddings, and funerals.
2:32 PM ET: Ingenico has several new products to show me (plus a sleek new trade show booth), and what really catches my eye is their Manage 360 remote monitoring software. Among the important outcomes are keeping the merchant operating through payment device preventative detection diagnostic tools that a manager or VAR can access from anywhere. That’s good for the merchant and it provides time savings plus recurring revenue for the solution provider. And small ISOs who might not be able to handle the support load can delegate problem resolution to Ingenico.
6:11 PM: I’m catching up on email at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and discover these rapid-fire AI examples curated by Cleveland Research and shared in their weekly fintech email:
Shopify Brings Merchant Catalogs to ChatGPT, Perplexity
- RSPA member Shopify has introduced its Agentic Storefronts in order to put merchant products into AI chat interfaces. Shopify merchants can now publish their catalogs to AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, where shoppers can ask questions, make comparisons, and complete purchases.
DoorDash Testing A Restaurant Discovery App Called Zesty
- DoorDash is testing a new restaurant discovery app, Zesty, that uses AI to generate local restaurant recommendations.
SoundHound AI Integrates With OpenTable to Introduce In-Vehicle Reservations
- The new tool enables drivers/passengers to find, select, and book restaurant reservations through their cars infotainment systems, with connections to over 60,000 restaurants worldwide.
Instacart Launches App, End-to-End Shopping In ChatGPT
- Instacart has launched an app that can help users find desired products from local retailers and present a ready-to-review cart assisted by OpenAI models. Customers can also pay directly in the Instacart app within ChatGPT with “instant checkout.”
Target Embraces Agentic Commerce With New ChatGPT Experience
- Target has launched an app experience directly in ChatGPT to facilitate the search/purchase of Target products. The app allows customers to find personalized options, purchase multiple items in a single transaction, and choose from a variety of fulfillment options including drive up/pickup.
10:15 PM: Back on the ground in Raleigh, I look at my week ahead. The RSPA has formed an AI Advisory Group, an extension of our Emerging Technologies Advisory Group, and we’ll be meeting with 40+ members to put the finishing touches on version 1.0 of the RSPA AI Resource Hub which will be launched later this month.
The goal of the AI Resource Hub is to provide RSPA members with targeted guidance on AI application, both for internal efficiency and for monetization. It will feature at least five web pages with content – and lots of AI examples – specifically for retail IT VARs and ISVs:
- AI Terminology and Definitions: AI terms retail IT VARs and ISVs need to know
- Common AI Tools: Details, examples, and instructions on common AI tools VARs and ISVs should investigate
- Internal Efficiency-Focused AI Applications for VARs & ISVs: Use cases organized by business outcomes that show how retail IT solution providers are applying AI inside their organizations
- Merchant-Facing AI Applications: Use cases organized by business outcomes detailing how merchants are using AI to benefit their customers and their bottom line
- AI Misconceptions & Best Practices: We’ll help you overcome any fear of AI, sharing where to start, where to focus, and what to do to benefit your business and your clients
At last year’s NRF, it was encouraging to see retail IT vendors get more practical about AI. This year was another step forward for solution providers who love technology not for technology’s sake but because of the massive upside it provides their merchant customers.
We don’t need more information; we need more examples – and high-initiative retail IT VARs and ISVs to never stop innovating.
