What to expect from this year’s top challenges and retail solutions
As the retail industry kicks off each year, the NRF Showcase provides the perfect opportunity to explore the latest trends, tech, and strategies shaping the future of retail.
NRF 2025 brought together leaders from iconic brands like Saks OFF 5TH, Pandora, Indigo, and Tapestry Inc., offering invaluable insights into their unique retail approaches.
With over 100 sessions and workshops, NRF 2025 covered everything from the year’s hottest trends to the challenges retailers are tackling, all while unveiling the strategies driving success for some of the world’s best-known brands.
This year’s major theme was AI—its growing role in optimizing operations, enhancing customer experience, and driving business growth. Across the sessions, it became clear that AI will continue to shape the key retail trends we’ll see in 2025, but differently and more intentionally than before.
Here are the top 5 retail trends to expect in the coming year:
Trend #1: Augmenting human roles with AI
At NRF 2025, a key insight emerged: AI isn’t replacing people—it’s enhancing them. Retailers are increasingly recognizing that while automation and AI offer incredible efficiency, the true value lies in augmenting human roles with AI. This was evident in sessions like Transform Retail with AI: Elevating Performance and Enhancing Human Roles at Sam’s Club and C&A. Whether through smarter decision-making, better personalization, or faster service, AI is becoming a tool that empowers employees to deliver richer, more meaningful customer experiences.
Rather than fully automating interactions, retailers are focusing on how AI can assist associates in fostering more personal, human-centered connections, as explored in sessions like Global Retail Trends: Why the Human Touch is Key to Leveraging the Full Potential of AI. By blending the strengths of AI with human intuition, retailers can scale personalized service while maintaining the emotional, relational side of shopping.
Trend #2: Leveraging AI to boost profits and streamline operations
Building on the previous trend, retailers at NRF 2025 emphasized that AI’s greatest value often lies behind the scenes. Rather than interacting directly with customers, AI is being used to optimize processes, conduct in-depth data analysis, and enhance associate productivity. For example, AI-driven scheduling, as explored in AI-driven Scheduling and Task Management: How Indigo Books Transformed Retail Operations, helps with demand forecasting, overcoming labor law compliance challenges, and striking a balance between maximizing sales and minimizing costs.
Retailers are also using AI to analyze customer engagement data, enabling more targeted outreach and boosting conversions. By providing actionable insights and real-time recommendations, AI empowers brands to improve their bottom line while allowing associates to focus on high-value tasks. Ultimately, this trend highlights AI’s role in driving profit optimization and business growth by streamlining operations and making better use of available resources.
Trend #3: Powering unified commerce with AI
Unified commerce remained a top priority for retailers looking to deliver a seamless brand experience across all channels—e-commerce sites, apps, social messaging, stores, and pop-ups. The consensus? AI is key to making this vision a reality.
Sessions like Leveraging AI to Improve Omnichannel Experiences, Engage Consumers, and Grow Customer Relationships focused on how AI technologies enable retailers to effectively adopt an omnichannel model and enhance the customer experience. By integrating AI and other emerging technologies, digital tools can offer deeper customer insights, improve operational efficiency, unlock new business opportunities, and streamline the shopping experience across platforms.
The role of autonomous AI for unified commerce also gained attention, with sessions like Agents Transform Retail: Autonomous AI for 24/7 Revenue Growth. Retailers are exploring how autonomous AI can enhance back-end operations, improve conversions, and strengthen customer relationships by seamlessly connecting the customer journey across all touchpoints.
Trend #4: Creating meaningful and personal customer experiences
It wouldn’t be NRF without a spotlight on customer experience and personalization, perennial themes that remain at the heart of retail innovation. What stood out this year was the renewed focus on personalization through the lens of the customer journey in sessions like Inspired by IKEA: Redefining in-store customer journeys with AI-driven insights, Mastering digital personalization: Crafting unique journeys, and From appetites to insights – How AI is mapping the entire customer journey. Retailers are prioritizing ways to create unique, distinctive experiences by analyzing and optimizing every touchpoint.
The conversation also extended to the post-purchase experience in sessions like Elevating the post-purchase experience: How to close the loyalty loop, which plays a critical role in building long-term trust and loyalty.
Stores, meanwhile, are still at the forefront, being reimagined as experience hubs that complement the digital journey, offering immersive, personalized in-store interactions. Whether it’s tailoring the in-store customer journey with AI or modernizing eCommerce experiences, retailers are working to ensure every interaction is meaningful and authentic. Ultimately, enhancing customer experience isn’t just about transactions—it’s about creating lasting, trusted connections.
Trend #5: Returning attention to digital transformation
While “digital transformation” may seem like a buzzword from the past, NRF 2025 showed that it remains a key focus for retailers, especially as AI continues to reshape the landscape. Sessions like How Lowe’s leverages AI to become an agile digital retailer and Enhancing the Associate & Customer Experiences at Walmart with Store Digitalization highlighted that retailers are turning their attention back to digital experiences and digital growth, recognizing the importance of evolving both online and in-store to meet customer expectations.
AI for digital retailing is helping brands modernize operations, while innovations like geolocation and store digitization enhance the overall customer experience. At the same time, social commerce is opening new channels for engagement and sales, further driving the shift toward a digitally integrated, customer-centric retail ecosystem. This renewed focus on digital transformation underscores its ongoing relevance in an AI-driven world.
Learn more
Miss us at NRF but interested in learning about the retail solutions that will help you better prepare for the coming year?
Book a demo of our three new Tulip solutions:
- Online Assisted Selling for eCommerce: pair your online customers with human virtual shopping assistants to drive higher AOV and greater loyalty
- Outreach: a bold new approach to converting your occasional shoppers into loyal customers through targeted, personalized, and carefully curated outreach that scales across your entire customer database. Tulip Outreach connects targets directly to a designated sales associate or product advisor to enhance conversion and increase revenue.
- Messaging AI: help your sales associates and advisors craft smart and personalized 1:1 messages for a wide range of communications, from thank-you’s to local events, new inventory to seasonal greetings, and more
Or contact us today to learn more about Tulip’s mobile-first, cloud-based, omnichannel POS and the #1 Clienteling solution in the world that is loved by the industry’s most iconic retailers.
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