From Warehouses to Robot Shoppers: Jason Goldberg Talks Retail’s AI Makeover - Ep. 286

Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. We're talking retail, the state of AI in retail specifically, with Jason Goldberg. Jason, better known as retail geek, is chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Group. Apologies to the French. I probably just mangled that. No. You nailed it. Perfect. And he's a well known and well followed expert in all things retail, ecommerce, and digital transformation. Jason's also a podcaster, so I'm gonna give a quick shout here because, you know, we gotta take care of one another. You can check out the Jason and Scott show as well. But first, let's talk AI in retail. Jason, welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time. Oh my gosh. Noah, thanks so much for having me. So let's dive right into it. AI changing lots of things, including the way we shop. How is AI affecting the way people shop, both in stores and online right now? Yeah. Great question. And first of all, I should acknowledge, there's not universal agreement. It's it in our little pool of retail, there's a lot of people that think this has been the most transformative, biggest disruption, you know, hugest change in our lifetime, and I I tend to lean slightly in that direction. But there are a lot of equally smart people that talk a lot about how it's likely overhyped and hasn't had a really big impact and that it might all be one one giant hallucination. I just wanna acknowledge there's a a fun dispute about that in in the space at the moment. I feel like I've heard that same dispute in other spaces as well. So well taken, and, you know, we'll we'll proceed with that in mind. Fair enough. So that being said, specifically in retail, I like to think about there being two big branches of impact from AI. The first branch is what I'll call the optimization branch. There's a lot of things we've been doing in in retail forever. Commerce is 6,000 years old. We have a lot of processes that haven't changed an awful lot over time, and AI has made many of those processes more efficient. It's made us better at those processes. So we either get better outcomes from the same effort or we get the the same outcome from from less effort. And so these are things like supply chain optimization, conversion optimization, labor optimization, and we we could go get into a bunch of specific examples of retailers that have gotten better at the things they always do as a result of the all these new capabilities that AI has unleashed on us. And and that alone would be huge and disruptive, and I and I would argue those are the kinds of things that we've seen already start to happen at reasonable scale. So if you say, like, what is the financial impact been to date of AI? It's it's largely things in …