Retail POV
Retail & CPG, from the C-suite seat
For retail and CPG executives — Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers, CMOs, and VPs of Transformation. Written from the forward-deployed seat: production AI inside enterprise retail, not slideware about it. Where AI is earning margin, where it's pilot theater, and what your Monday-morning next move is.
The retail board memo every CIO should write this quarter
Capital markets reward AI announcements, but the P&L lags. Here is the CODN-framed board memo retail CIOs should write before the 2026 budget locks.
Demand forecasting has a signal problem, not a model problem
Retailers keep buying smarter forecasting models to compensate for dirty inputs. The bottleneck is signal quality, not algorithms.
CPG trade promotion is retail's most underused AI workload
CPGs spend up to a quarter of revenue on trade promotion and 72 percent of it loses money. That is the AI workload nobody is prioritizing.
The omnichannel measurement stack that actually closes the loop
Most omnichannel measurement stacks report but never act. Closing the loop needs identity, incrementality, and an action layer that moves spend.
Personalization is back, and worse than before
The personalization vendors that died in 2023 are reborn as agentic. Most of it is the same broken assumptions in a better wrapper.
The CFO's AI question every CDO is failing
There's one question retail CFOs are starting to ask their CDOs about AI investment. Most CDOs aren't ready for it — and the ones who are change the conversation from ROI to CODN.
The $40M data lake nobody asks about anymore
Three years ago every Tier 1 retailer built a data lake. The AI conversation moved on and the lake went quiet. Here's the retrofit the winning retailers are quietly running.