Several people gather around a bleach-blond man in a bright pink suit, suspended from a clear plastic tube. With a microphone in front of him and a giant sign reading “TALK TO ME” above it, “Mike” patiently holds his hands in front of his body, waiting to take questions from the public. “Mike” is a hologram created by a company called Hypervsn using ChatGPT.
Mike’s responses to viewer comments and questions will be delayed by about 3 seconds, but the disruption to the flow of the conversation may not be too much of an issue. Hypervsn booth attendants say that when “Mike” and their ilk are placed in stores, they serve more as an icebreaker, a way to entice potential customers to engage with the brand. (The world’s largest holographic display thrills tourists at the Las Vegas Sphere, also manufactured by Hypervsn.)
The Microphone is one of the flashiest products on display at the National Retail Federation’s big annual trade show. The trade show brings together more than 1,000 retail-adjacent companies in New York City to sell each other’s products and services and use those products to sell physical goods to others. In addition to the big players (Google, Alibaba, Amazon), there are numerous companies that are helping to enhance the online and in-person shopping experience, but are unknown to the average consumer. But no matter what vendors are on display, one thing is clear. The future they envision for all of us is overwhelmingly filled with AI, and in many cases filled with AI in ways that consumers will likely dislike.
A few feet away from the “mic” is another hologram, also suspended in a transparent box several feet high. It’s a small gnome-like creature (I didn’t catch the name) in a black-and-white, vaguely medieval costume. Occasionally, he answers audience questions with rhyming verses, and his little hands gesture spontaneously like animatronics at a theme park. According to Hypervsn representatives, retail customers are increasingly requesting non-human holographic characters to distance themselves from fears that AI will replace or eliminate human jobs. If this is the future of retail, even “Mike” may not have a place in it.
A lot of promises were made at the National Retail Federation’s big trade show held in mid-January. Some exhibitors vowed to “give touchscreens to everything,” while others reassured convention attendees that “commerce favors the bold.” But the most pressing hope concerned AI. Shopify announced:loveOther exhibitors touted “smart people counting” and “AI customer flow analysis.” We are here not for magic, but for “AI commercialization execution.”
To the average consumer, many of these may be word salad, but when shopping online, the rise of AI has become inevitable. Retail and technology companies have packed AI into nearly every step of the buying process, from product design, discovery and comparison, to a call to a physical store, to try-on, to the final checkout. At the NRF trade show, Google announced an open source standard called Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) that enables retailers and AI agents to communicate and integrate. This will allow shoppers, for example, to buy items from Target within Google’s AI mode without having to visit Target’s website. As tech companies build more direct purchasing capabilities into their chatbots, some hope coupons and sales will encourage purchases. Google also announced that retailers will now be able to offer discounts to shoppers who browse in AI mode. Monetizing shopping with AI is clearly a priority for Google. The company had a big presence at the show, with CEO Sundar Pichai giving a keynote address (Pichai, on the other hand, made no public appearances at CES, and Google didn’t have any major announcements).
As AI is embedded in every gadget, platform, and service imaginable, you can’t help but wonder who the target audience is and whether anyone wanted the kind of functionality enabled by AI.
Pizza chain Papa Johns is one of the partners integrating Google’s agent shopping capabilities into its ordering system. Customers will soon be able to order via a chatbot that can autofill their last order, suggest products based on dietary restrictions, add coupons and deals, and get group order recommendations using a “pizza assistant.” In a demo video shared by Papa Johns, the chatbot assistant asks how many people are in the group. Don’t want to count how many people are eating? No problem. Simply upload a photo of your entire group to the Papa John’s chatbot.
Of course, there is also the evolution of industries that have been completely transformed by the rapid introduction of AI. While retailers once prioritized tweaking their websites to help Google rank their links above their competitors in searches, search engine optimization (SEO) has now branched out into a new acronym focused on AI. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), GSO (Generative Search Optimization), and other terms that the public will despise in the future. A company called Fabric promises to help brands and retailers monitor their performance within platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and measure how often their products appear compared to their competitors. A Fabric representative said that some retailers are particularly good at surfacing with AI chat (Nordstrom, for example), but acknowledged that no one is aware of it. Really I know how the system works and what to choose and promote. According to the company’s website, Fabric’s AI monitoring service starts at $500 per month.
Many of the products and services on display at the NRF Show come from companies working on the back end, things like inventory management tools and logistics, about which consumers don’t have much insight. But consumers are an ever-deepening well of data. The promise of AI in retail is that these tools can extract more and more information from us and use it to sell us more and more.
Solum is a South Korean company that specializes in digital displays and shelves, such as billboards that run glossy advertisements for crisps and beer in supermarkets. But the next iteration is to hyper-personalize and target in-store shoppers the way digital retailers can for online shoppers. Technology built by a South Korean startup called SpaceVision allows retailers to assign a number to each shopper and track their movements within the store. That is, how long they saw an ad, whether they just walked by without engaging, whether they picked up an item from the shelf, etc. Stores can then use that data to trigger specific actions. For example, if you see an ad for a certain type of chips on a display, a store might promote a deal that offers beer with the purchase of chips. Apply online shopping tracking to the real world. As I approached the wall of Coors and Heineken (not affiliated with Space Vision) cans lined up on shelves in the Solum booth, I noticed a screen above the display. It took me a while to realize that my image from the SpaceVision demo was staring back at me. I have a bold frame around my face, global ID number 485, gender: female, age range: 18-29. Retailers can use this data to track the demographic breakdown of people passing in front of their displays, their “look” and “attention” rates, and conversions.
A SpaceVision employee who worked at the show’s booth said that when deployed in the real world, videos will be deleted 1 millisecond after metadata is captured. They focus on milking engagement data that can be used to retarget shoppers later. The technology has so far only been used in some stores in South Korea and Japan, but staff acknowledged that shoppers in Europe and the United States may be concerned about the technology becoming part of the in-person shopping experience. This is essentially creating a vast dragnet of data about IRL shopping habits and unearthing new, more invasive ways to sell things: ways to monetize the ubiquitous eye. European shoppers will balk at the cameras. On the other hand, the staff says, “Asians don’t care.”
Equapack’s booth stood out at NRF 2026 for several reasons. For one, I stumbled across it in one of the many rooms at the show, and the booth was empty. There were no giant LED screens, no holographic gnomes, no humanoid talking robots, no grandiose AI-related promises. The booth consisted of several long, white shelves, carefully arranged with dozens of shopping bags, totes, cooler bags, and other retail packaging. The selection included the iconic and instantly recognizable name, featuring the classic red and white Supreme streetwear logo on an all-white bag. US Open Drawstring Backpack. Tote bag with Broadway logo lion king. Unlike everything else I saw during the day, Equapack’s product was designed to get closer to the human at the end of the transaction without adding data layers, AI-powered analytics, or additional layers of abstraction.
Eran Rothschild, founder and CEO of Equapac, says the trade show used to be more tactile. Every package they design starts with a problem that the brand needs to solve. Perhaps you need something to keep perishable items cold for a period of time, or perhaps you just need an aesthetically pleasing and exciting bag. Equapack doesn’t use AI, so it doesn’t promise AI-powered solutions, but Rothschild acknowledged that it probably should, at least for back-end operations. Design is only 25% of the job.
“We will probably never use AI visualization because it’s not true to the product we’re trying to deliver,” Rothschild says. “We like to make samples and create that feel. Nobody buys what they can’t see.”
AI Slop has one goal: scale. It doesn’t matter whether the AI-generated clips flooding social media are good or funny; It simply needs to occupy space and therefore human time. Could an AI chatbot on every online ordering page transform the customer experience, whether it’s ordering clothing or delivering pizza? Maybe. But it also feels like an increase in bulk that has little to do with whether what we buy, the actual product that arrives at our homes, is better than it would have been otherwise.
As we talked, I realized that I personally own several bags made by Rothschild, including the packaging from The RealReal, a marketplace for used clothing and accessories. Whether your purchase is $30 or $3,000, The RealReal will mail your item in a cloth trash bag, but this is primarily limited to high-end retailers. I reuse all the dust bags I get and carefully store items inside them to protect them and extend their lifespan. For each project, Rothschild thinks about how consumers experience packaging, whether it is reusable or luxurious. Do my purchases feel like money well spent? Of all the technology and services I see throughout my day, Equapack’s products are one of the few that consumers can actually pick up and take home with them. There is a purpose and a sense of intimacy. You’ll probably never look back fondly on the experience of chatting with an AI shopping assistant. But the humble shopping bag is here to stay.
