AI was everywhere at Shoptalk Fall, but retail execs couldn’t stop talking about human connection

Steps away from Nashville’s iconic Broadway strip bustling with country bars and tourist traps, was Shoptalk Fall’s first ever rodeo in town, bringing more than 3,500 retail leaders to Music City Center for three days of conversations about what retail might look like in 2027.

In true Nashville fashion, the mainstage—renamed “the headliner stage”—was also home to a live country band. But rest assured, it was indeed a retail conference, with an inaugural theme of “Retail Unplugged,” that delved into AI-driven customer experiences, modernized tech, and the increasingly blurry intersection of commerce, content, and community.

And if you spent enough time sitting through sessions—as Retail Brew did—a few themes started sounding familiar.

AI, of course, was difficult to escape. But instead of simply talking about how retailers can deploy the technology, executives kept coming back to what AI is changing about how consumers discover brands, and, more importantly, what brands still need humans to do.

Meanwhile, executives from TikTok Shop, Favorite Daughter, Glow Recipe, Estée Lauder Companies, Crocs, and others kept returning to two decidedly less futuristic ideas: entertaining people and building actual relationships with them.

Here are three takeaways Retail Brew gleaned at Shoptalk Fall.

Beyond being discovered

With consumers increasingly turning to AI tools for product discovery, the conversation has shifted from simply appearing in search results to becoming the product an AI assistant actually recommends.

Favorite Daughter Co-Founder and Co-CEO Sara Foster said the brand is already thinking about that distinction.

“We want to work now on being the brand that is not suggested; we want to be recommended,” Foster said. “We don’t want to be suggested among everyone else.”

But that, per Favorite Daughter executives, requires brands to put more information about themselves into the world—and make sure that information accurately reflects what they want to be known for—as large language models become another gateway to product discovery.

Still, AI’s expanding role doesn’t mean handing everything over to machines. Christine Chang, co-founder and co-CEO of Glow Recipe, said the beauty brand has experimented with AI tools for social listening and responding to customers, but found limits pretty quickly.

“We have tested different AI solutions to actually add the comments back to customers. That experiment lasted about a day,” Chang said, adding that the brand’s “witty banter” and tone still require human oversight.

Commerce is entertainment

Shoptalk itself listed “the intersection of commerce, content, and community” among this year’s major themes, and execs offered plenty of examples of what that looks like in practice.

TikTok Shop’s President of Strategic Initiatives Patrick Nommensen, for example, said traditional e-commerce has historically been search-driven, meaning a consumer knows what they want, looks for it, compares options, and buys it. By contrast, TikTok Shop increasingly starts with discovery.

Sarah Potempa, founder of Beachwaver, described TikTok live shopping less as a digital storefront and more like hanging out with an audience, where she might spend hours educating shoppers about products while also entertaining them.

In the meantime, Favorite Daughter is also experimenting with the format. After its first owned live shopping event ahead of National Daughters Day, Foster summed up the opportunity rather simply as “entertainment.” “It’s not commerce,” she said. “It’s entertainment.”

Likewise, Crocs is blurring those lines through “microdramas,” short-form entertainment designed to live alongside creators, organic content, and TikTok Shop, rather than interrupt them.

And for Estée Lauder Companies, social platforms increasingly function as both storefronts and marketing engines. Tara Simon, president of the Americas, pointed to Clinique’s Black Honey lipstick, which saw sales rise at Ulta Beauty and Amazon within hours of a TikTok Shop campaign taking off.

“It’s a marketing lever,” Simon said of TikTok Shop, noting that today’s customer journey is increasingly interconnected across platforms.

Physical retail isn’t losing the fight to digital

For all the discussion of TikTok, LLMs, and agentic commerce, executives were also remarkably optimistic about stores.

Favorite Daughter plans to open “a ton more stores,” Foster said, viewing physical locations not only as places to transact, but as customer-acquisition tools and potentially mini fulfillment hubs.

Crocs executives, meanwhile, pointed to stores as an important venue for personalization. Shoppers can spend significant time at Jibbitz bars customizing their shoes, an experience that both builds a connection with the brand and produces something worth sharing online afterward.

So that ultimately might be the bigger takeaway from Nashville. The retail industry may be racing toward AI-powered commerce, but executives don’t seem particularly interested in choosing between technology and more traditional retail experiences. Instead, the winning formula they consistently described was both: AI that makes shopping easier and more personalized, content that makes it entertaining, communities that make consumers care, and stores that give them somewhere to experience it all in real life.