Humanity as Differentiator

I just spent a few days in New York City at NRF 2026, the premier conference for the retail industry in the United States. For those unfamiliar, NRF is a behemoth – nearly 40,000 retail practitioners descending on the Javits Center each January.

My primary observation: AI wasn’t just present at this year’s event, it dominated everything. Every session. Every conversation. Every exhibitor pitch. Everything was presented through an AI lens. You couldn’t avoid it, even if you tried.

And I did.

NRF 2026 wasn’t billed as a “retail & AI” conference, but that’s exactly what it was. AI optimizing your supply chain. AI promising store operations efficiency. AI running wild on product catalogs to enable agentic shopping. Robots massaging data so websites are easier for other robots to navigate.

I wasn’t surprised by the saturation. Just look around. AI is being shoehorned into our daily interactions and companies are desperate to brand themselves as AI companies. The US economy is being propped up by AI investment, and retail is claiming its share.

What struck me was the opportunity cost.

In a landscape where every company fetishizes AI – in their products, in their operations, in their marketing – there’s a massive opening for companies brave enough to lean the other direction. Into humanity. Into the natural world. Into what makes us distinctly human.

I caught glimpses of this alternative path. Ryan Reynolds' keynote touched on it. My friend Justin Weinstein’s talk about grocers serving their communities embodied it. But these were exceptions in a sea of sameness.

Here’s what I’m imagining: What if a company stood up and publicly declared they would resist artificial intelligence in their operations? What if they said instead they’d invest in people – the people who make the company work and the people the company serves? And what if they went all-in on this message in their marketing?

That decision would instantly differentiate them in a meaningful, substantive way.

The irony of everyone chasing the same AI strategy is that it eliminates competitive advantage. When everyone optimizes for the same thing, nobody stands out. But a company that deliberately chooses humanity over automation? Right now that’s an admirable decision and a signal customers can’t ignore.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of company I’d get in line to support.