Retail’s big show, NRF 2024, once again brought together a wide spectrum of practitioners focused on innovation and transformation. While AI was at the center of every conversation, the state of the global economy and other hot topics also gained a fair share of voice:

• Inflation and its role in consumer spending
• Impact on trade routes and contingency plans
• Effects of organized retail crime
• Progress on sustainability measures
• Keeping front line workers engaged

Equally, there was a great amount of euphoria around the latest trends, technologies, and industry disruptors shaping the future of retail. More specifically, the role of ecommerce continues to be strong as brick and mortar brands think about keeping the momentum on all revenue streams.

If you missed this year’s conference, here’s a quick summary of my top 5 highlights from the event:

• Generative AI has captured everyone’s attention. The adoption curve looks very different depending on the size of the business and sub category but the appetite to test and learn was incredibly high.
• Omnichannel has multiple layers and all of them matter – from multiple sales and distribution channels to a cohesive cross-channel marketing and promotions strategy and, the interplay between online and offline.
• Retail media networks have arrived. Not only is this poised as an unavoidable engagement channel, it is now an unignorable revenue stream. The sooner brands get to configuring their platforms for “behind the scenes” ad tech operations, the greater a chance for first-mover advantages.
• Personalization continues to make strides. Better quality data and well-connected access to data is helping push the boundary on what’s possible with personalization and delivering one-to-one experiences for known shoppers.
• Customer centricity and its importance – a recurring theme at the heart of all retail strategies, every brand intended to deliver the best for their audience with a great level of detail to understand motivations of Gen Z and Gen A!

Understanding shoppers and serving exceptional experiences is non-negotiable. This makes them repeat buyers. At Algolia, we are laser focused in helping brands accomplish this through our AI Search platform, innovative and cutting edge generative shopping experiences and next generation AI enabled merchandising studio.

We also announced a new Algolia Merchandising Studio at NRF. The Studio is a one-stop-shop for merchandisers to curate, track, and measure results from their promotional campaigns. Built for merchandisers, it allows anyone to see how products are displayed in search results or dynamic catalogs, create rules or use pinning to display products for different promotions, and view metrics related to campaigns. In fact, the latest version of Merchandising Studio allows ecommerce teams to see campaign and sales results by metrics such as clicks, conversions, purchases, and more. The Merchandising Studio is a free add-on to our Premium and Elevate plans.