Artificial intelligence, long touted as the magic ingredient that can bring a personal touch to a retail shopper’s experience, is also being directed at improving the experience of humans working in physical retail stores, according to several big-brand presenters at NRF’25, the annual conference of the National Retail Federation.

At multiple sessions at NRF’25 in the Javits Center in New York City on January 13, retail executives discussed ways they are boosting sales via personalized customer experiences, in part by improving the experience of front-of-house sales associates in stores.

Personalization has in the past generally meant figuring out what items might be attractive to a customer, or tailoring goods or services to suit their specific dimensions, preferences or needs. Now, personalization also means providing a sense of relationship with sales staff, as representatives of brands.

Certainly, there is still plenty of activity around product recommendations, as demonstrated by Greg Pulsifer, senior vice president of e-commerce for Sam’s Club, which benefits from its membership model, allowing it to gather huge amounts of data about shoppers’ tastes and habits. “We know 100% of our members,” said Pulsifer. “We can use that to tailor marketing messages.”

But now, there’s a growing focus on supporting sales associates with AI tools so that they're freed up to do the more fun parts of their job. For example, Target in August, 2024 announced the introduction of its Store Companion, a chatbot that uses generative AI (GenAI) to answer on-the-job process questions, coach new team members, support store operations management and more.

The idea is to make the teams' jobs easier and allow them to work more quickly and efficiently, offering faster service and deeper guest engagement to make the shopping experience even better. “We want to improve the everyday working lives of on-the-floor store workers,” said Meredith Jordan, vice president of engineering for store product engineering at Target. “We want to free them up to focus on providing great customer experience.”

Agentic AI, which can make decisions and take actions independently (it has “agency”), is emerging as the secret sauce that can make the experience of shopping truly delicious, retail executives hope. “Agentic AI will put large language models and generative AI to work,” said Yogesh Kulkarni, vice president of product and solution strategy, generative AI Frontline Solutions at Zebra Technologies, which along with Qualcomm and Google Cloud designed and implemented the Target Store Companion tool.

Data gathered about customers, channeled the right way to sales associates and managers, empowers them to build relationships and retain critical information that allows them to deliver better service – some would say this is a return to the sort of experience shoppers used to have when they mostly interacted with smaller, local shops, where staff knew them. 

Read More: Retail in 2025 — Price and Convenience Will Continue to Trump Tech

That's a significant shift from the attitude big brands have demonstrated in the past. It’s not so long since the online and brick-and-mortar divisions of retail brands operated in totally separated universes as far as the consumer was concerned. It’s only relatively recently that you can buy something online and return it in-store, or enjoy any of a number of benefits of “omnichannel” commerce. “Customers don’t think in terms of channels,” said Ken Feyder, vice president and head of IT – Americas for Hermès of Paris. Retailers have struggled to put themselves in the heads of their customers, rather than expecting them to adapt to whatever operational model is currently in play. Thanks to many developments in technology, including AI, that's changing.

Now, there’s also a focus on the in-store worker, including figuring out ways to make it easier to perform functions the consumer never sees, such as stocking shelves, checking inventory or addressing problems with point-of-sales systems. Target’s Store Companion allows a sales associate to take a photo of a store shelf, and the bot will automatically identify low-stock items, locate where replenishment inventory is, and even give an alert when there’s an item that should be on another shelf. The tool also serves as a store process expert and coach, helping new and seasonal team members learn on the job.

To be sure, nobody’s going to stop aiming the capabilities of AI directly at the shopper any time soon. Target is also using GenAI to summarize reviews and make the product descriptions on its site pages even more relevant, in order to help shoppers make better-informed purchase decisions. Product information continues to be a thorn in the side of online retailers – it’s been colossally expensive to generate in the past. But AI makes it easier and cheaper, enhancing the possibility of boosting sales not just by giving better info to consumers, but also sales associates. “So far, growth and success have come from product recommendations and e-mail campaigns,” said Josh Friedman, vice president of digital products at ULTA Beauty. “But we need to get better at content.”

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Overall, the latest technologies offer a vision of the future where sales associates are empowered to make consumers feel they are seen and known, not impersonal data caches. 

“This is a once-in-a-generation technological transformation,” said Art Miller, vice president and global head of retail IoT (internet of things) at Qualcomm Technologies. “This is a big deal.”

Gathering business intelligence about customers allows a sales associate to deepen a relationship with them, Feyder at Hermès said. “It allows them to augment their personal relationship; we’re not replacing it with technology.” This, in turn, fosters brand loyalty; something that’s becoming increasingly threatened in the cut-throat price war being waged against established brands by low-price competitors such as Temu and Shein. “Loyalty is the new cookies,” said ULTA’s Friedman.

“Ideally, we’ll stop talking about digital personalization. It’s personalization,” said Giri Agarwal, chief strategy officer at consulting firm Incisiv, moderated a session entitled “Mastering Digital Personalization: Crafting Unique Journeys.” 

Christopher Thomas-Moore, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Domino's Pizza, went further. “I want to leverage away from even labeling it ‘personalization,’” he said. “It’s just how we do business.”