Every January, the retail world converges at the Javits Center for NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show. It’s always a moment to take the pulse of the industry, not just in terms of AI retail technology trends and shifts, but in how retailers are thinking about customer experience, operations, media, the growth of online shopping and the future of unified commerce.
As part of Globant’s Commerce Studio, I spend my days helping brands navigate complexity: modernizing legacy stacks, elevating customer journeys, embedding AI into the commerce ecosystem, and shaping paths toward scalable, future-ready architectures. NRF is where all of those conversations come together. This year, instead of claiming to have all the answers, I’m approaching NRF with genuine curiosity about what other leaders are uncovering and how those insights will evolve our consulting, experience design, and technology work with clients.
Here are the themes I’m most interested in exploring at NRF 2026, and why they matter for the future of commerce and for the transformation journeys we lead at Globant.
1. How AI and Agentic Commerce Are Moving From Concept to Capability
With an entire AI Stage on the agenda this year, NRF is clearly signaling where retail is headed. AI is no longer an add-on; it’s becoming embedded in how retailers think about decision-making, customer engagement, and operational efficiency.
What I’m most interested in this year is clarity. Who is actually deploying AI in meaningful ways? Which agentic capabilities have moved beyond pilots and prototypes? And how are retailers aligning data, architecture, and organizational readiness to make AI real at scale?
Working with the team at Globant’s Commerce Studio has given me a front-row seat in the strategy, ideation, and execution of AI initiatives, including guided selling flows, personalization, and digital shopping assistants powered by LLMs. NRF feels like an opportunity to step back and see how others are approaching similar challenges, what’s resonating in the market, and where different approaches are starting to converge.
Understanding how retailers are embedding intelligence deeper into areas such as assortment, pricing, promotion, and inventory planning, and how they identify foundational gaps early, before jumping straight to the most visible use cases, is one aspect I’m very interested in. NRF should offer a useful benchmark: separating what’s working today from what’s still aspirational, and helping clarify where agentic commerce is truly delivering value versus where it’s still evolving.
2. The Maturation of Unified Commerce and How Leaders Are Actually Making It Work
We’ve officially moved beyond omnichannel omnichannel retail strategy as a talking point. The conversation now is unified commerce: one view of the customer, one view of inventory, and one experience across every channel.
What stands out in this year’s agenda is a deeper focus on the mechanics that make unified commerce possible, integrated systems, cross-channel orchestration, and data cohesion. These are the foundations that allow experiences to feel connected and intentional, rather than fragmented.
This is an area I spend a lot of time thinking about through my work, where the challenge is rarely vision and almost always execution. Modernizing legacy stacks, connecting systems that weren’t designed to talk to each other, and balancing innovation with operational reality are ongoing themes across retailers of all sizes.
NRF feels like an important gut check. How are leaders actually making unified commerce work in practice? Where are they still seeing friction, governance, data ownership, and fulfillment complexity? And which decisions have made the biggest difference in scaling these efforts?
The response to these questions will define the trajectory of modernization and establish what ‘unified’ truly entails in the next era of commerce.
3. Commerce + Media: The Retail Media Network Evolution
Retail Media Networks aren’t new, but they’re entering a new phase, one where retailers are exploring:
- First-party data strategies
- Closed-loop measurement
- Media-commerce integration
- Curation, content, and onsite/offsite orchestration
RMNs touch every part of the commerce value chain: product discovery, brand revenue, margin expansion, and customer engagement. Across the industry, there’s growing interest in operationalizing Retail Media Networks, often before the underlying data, infrastructure, or experience frameworks are fully in place.
The conversation at NRF underscores a major opportunity for how retailers are treating RMNs not just as monetization engines, but as extensions of the customer journey, and how this shifts investment decisions across technology, data models, and experience design. There’s a real opportunity in connecting media strategy with commerce execution.
4. The (Often Unseen) Foundation: Data, Architecture, and Operational Readiness
A lot of NRF will focus on AI, CX, personalization, and in-store experiences. But the conversations happening behind the scenes with CIOs, CTOs, and operations leaders are the ones that determine whether any of it actually works.
Themes like:
- Clean, governed, accessible data, essential for retail data analytics
- Real-time inventory and supply-chain intelligence
- Integrated planning and forecasting
- Scalable, modular commerce architecture
- Organizational readiness for AI and automation
These are the enablers of everything else. They’re also the place where many transformation initiatives stall.
This is where many transformation efforts succeed or stall. The ability to sort through complexity, prioritize the right foundational investments, and build architectures that support innovation, rather than block it, is what ultimately enables progress.
What This Means for Us and Our Clients
NRF is about more than spotting new ideas. It’s about pressure-testing where the industry is headed and ensuring our clients have the right strategies, foundations, and partners to succeed.
We are looking to NRF 2026 for insights that sharpen our work across:
- AI-led commerce & agentic experiences
- Unified commerce modernization
- Experience design & store reinvention
- Retail media monetization
- Future-proof architecture & data readiness
These themes represent the intersection of creativity, technology, and business value, exactly where Globant’s Retail Studio and Commerce Studio thrive. As retailers prepare for their next chapter, our role is to bring clarity, direction, and executional strength to their transformation.
NRF serves as a critical checkpoint to gauge market sentiment. It raises the question: where are others looking to dig in this year, and what challenges are at the top of their priority list?
