While the real gold of what we learnt at the NRF Big Show, the largest retail / tech conference and trade show in the world, is being kept close for our internal use, we do have some takeaways to share.
The NRF Big Show 2025, organised by the National Retail Federation, attracted around 40,000 attendees and featured around 450 speakers across 200 sessions. The trade show hosted around 1,000 companies. It was a conference and trade show about tech in retail, for retailers.
This year’s theme, “Game Changer,” highlighted the pressing challenges and transformations within retail and urgent need for innovation and adaptability in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the hot topic in presentations and on vendor stands. Only a few companies on the trade show flow did not include AI in their key pitch. From the small and niche to the large, AI was the headline. Those without it felt out of date.
Key discussions at the event focused on the integration of AI across a range of businesses and covering a variety of uses:
- In retail:
- Migrating back off functions to the shop floor.
- Faster and better-quality decision making.
- Elimination of complete manual tasks.
- New monetisation opportunities.
- In software businesses:
- Faster development time, lower development costs.
- Faster, lower cost and more accessible customer service.
Conference sessions.
Workshops were packed, standing room only, often with 1,000 in attendance to hear from retailers and tech companies about their collaborative innovation and how it benefited the retailer.
AI driven inventory management was an often-covered topic. I sat in sessions on several different businesses (Dicks Sporting Goods, GAP clothing, Freedom Furniture (Australia), Men’s Warehouse, Academy Sports & Outdoors and more.
They covered how AI tools helped them cut inventory management labour costs, improve stock turn, make beneficial dynamic pricing decisions, have less out of stocks and increase sales by giving in-store associates easy access to information.
Most presentations talked about how third-party AI products were key to delivering these benefits, with the POS providing one of the data sources for the AI led innovation. On the trade show floor plenty of mid-tier POS software companies pitched embedded AI tools to help drive inventory related profitability. However, when asked two of these could not answer beyond a bland, canned, sales pitch.
The AI pitch from POS software companies to retailers in 2025 is reminiscent of the cloud pitch in the early 2000s except that the financial benefits of AI are tangible for all retailers, large and small – especially small given their limited resources and the easy access to the power of AI.
AI is more interesting to retailers today than cloud was (and maybe is) because it is ubiquitous, we see ourselves interacting with it daily.
A cohesive omnichannel solution pitch was common among all POS vendors. It was clear that integrations are key here, offering flexibility.
Ease of staff learning was also covered in several presentations with retailers noting that onboarding new staff had been dramatically reduced. At Dicks, for example, their goal was a POS UX facilitating training taking < 10 minutes compared to the previous 6 hours experience.
It was interesting hearing questions from retailers in the conference sessions. Most related to AI. These were usually from mid-size retail staff:
- What’s the labour cost saving from AI?
- How long does it take to experience saving from using AI?
- What’s the transactional cost of the AI tools?
- How hard is it to use the AI tools?
Each question has positive answers available. There was little contention or controversy. It left me with a feeling that for most AI was not a matter of if but more one of how soon can I.
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Tower Systems was an early adopter in the AI space for small business retail. In 2022 we delivered terrific innovation and have enhanced this since. Our retailers are loving the time they save thanks to our Ai tools and the quality business decisions they can make with speed as well.
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