AI in retail partnerships is no longer a hallway conversation at a trade show. It's changing how retailers evaluate technology vendors, and it leaves you asking who owns the customer relationship when a shopper starts in an AI assistant. Our then-Partner Manager came back from Shoptalk in March 2023 saying AI was everywhere and that it would speed up partner work. She was right that AI would dominate the conversation.

Key takeaways

• Our 2023 Shoptalk recap caught the moment. AI was the thing everyone was talking about, and the partner takeaway was speed.
• How retailers pick technology partners is changing. A Publicis Groupe executive told Modern Retail in February 2026 that the pace of change is exposing problems the old selection criteria can't handle.
• The newer question is ownership. As shoppers buy through third-party AI assistants, a Retail AI Council working group of retailers and technology providers had formed as of December 2025 to build a shared protocol so brands aren't cut out of their own customer relationships.
• In Endear's AI Opportunity Engine, AI sits inside the clienteling tool and a person reviews and sends by default.

In March 2023, our then-Partner Manager, Madeleine Anderson, attended Shoptalk in Las Vegas. With attending brands from Sephora to Bandier and an exciting musical performance by Nelly, the event didn't disappoint. We checked in with Madeleine to hear her thoughts about the conference.

What's the purpose of Shoptalk?

Shoptalk is one of the world's leading retail innovation summits. It brings together brands and tech providers from across the omnichannel retail world.

Was there any specific buzz?

Going into Shoptalk I was curious to see how different it would be from NRF. It was my first time attending but I had heard really great things. My main takeaway? AI (Artificial intelligence) is everywhere.

Every company is getting in on the AI trend in some way or another and it's really exciting to think about how the world might change with the increasing amount of AI services. When I first started hearing about AI or ChatGPT, I thought of big computers taking over. Now, I know that's not quite what things look like.

But let's back up. What exactly is ChatGPT? Sabrina Ortiz writes in her article, "ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, and code."

Working at a clienteling SaaS company, one might think AI is bad news for us, but that isn't necessarily true.

AI can be a really powerful tool for retail sales associates to use in addition to their clienteling tool. Does AI pose any threat to a traditional CRM like Endear? Absolutely not! In the same sense that Klaviyo and Endear go hand in hand in providing more robust services for our clients, ChatGPT or AI solutions are extremely beneficial tools for sales associates to utilize for their customer outreach.

What changed for partners?

How will AI change how we work with partners on marketing initiatives? Think of how much faster you could get the outline for a joint blog post or publish a case study highlighting a mutual customer! The excitement around AI and ChatGPT and the velocity in which it's evolving makes me really excited about the future of partner opportunities beyond the traditional lead sharing.

How did Shoptalk go overall?

Overall, the event was hugely successful. I talked to so many great partners and brands. I left with strong connections and it made me really excited about going into Q2. The Exhibitor Hall was always jam-packed and active. There's nothing better than the energy buzz on the first day of a conference.

The best part of the event (besides the excellent connections) was for sure the pre-booked meetings. I can't recommend them enough for people attending next year. These 15 minute "speed dating" type meetings were a quick and efficient way to get in front of brands and partners you want to know.

Final takeaways from the floor

There are more and more companies utilizing AI as a sparkly new value proposition. One company from Shoptalk that stands out for me is Algolia, which is optimizing your search results using AI. Hubspot is harnessing the power of AI by creating a Content Assistant. If we have already progressed this far since November, I can only imagine where we'll be with AI in a year!

What drives AI in retail partnerships now?

Business outcomes, not feature lists, according to the executives in one February 2026 Modern Retail piece. Mitchell Parton reported that AI is changing how retailers select technology partners across marketing, supply chain and merchandising. Jason Goldberg of Publicis Groupe told the publication that the new pace is exposing problems the old selection criteria can't handle.

Four of the executives quoted in that piece, and the part of each answer a partner team should act on (the middle column is our paraphrase, not a quote):

For a partner manager, that table is a checklist. If your joint pitch can't name the metric it moves, a live customer and how long rollout takes, it's competing on criteria Goldberg called insufficient. In our view, when a retailer would rather turn on a capability in a tool they already own, being the Klaviyo integration that makes an existing subscription do more beats being one more logo.

Who owns the customer relationship now?

Nobody has settled it, and some retailers have started organizing rather than waiting. In December 2025, Retail Dive reported that a Retail AI Council working group of retailers, technology providers and industry leaders had formed to keep their customer relationships intact as third-party AI grows, proposing an open standard, the Shopper Context Protocol, so a shopper arriving through an AI assistant still carries loyalty, preference or intent.

The problem it addresses is one Madeleine's 2023 answer didn't anticipate: back then the AI conversation was about drafting and searching. It's now also about intermediation. If a customer buys inside someone else's assistant and the brand never sees that conversation, the relationship thins out even while the revenue lands.

This is the part of the AI story where skepticism is healthy rather than lazy. We've written before about businesses backing off AI that added tooling without adding relationship. The useful test is whether an AI investment increases what you know about a customer, or just how fast you can message one.

Does AI threaten your retail CRM?

No, and the years since have made the answer less interesting rather than more. Madeleine's 2023 instinct, that AI would sit alongside a retail CRM rather than replace it, is roughly what happened for us. What changed is that, at Endear, the AI moved inside the CRM instead of living in a separate browser tab.

The reason is unglamorous. A general-purpose model can write a lovely message. It can't rank your customer list for today unless someone gives it the purchase history, the store visit, the wishlist and the appointment that make that judgment possible. The ranking is the hard part. The drafting was the easier part, which is why everyone demoed it in 2023.

What partner teams should do next

Treat AI as a joint go-to-market question, not a product question. Three things follow from the reporting above, and none needs a new tool:

1. Lead every partner pitch with the outcome. Name the metric, the customer and the timeline before you name the technology. That's the order retailers now evaluate in.
2. Audit your integration story before your feature story. If a retailer asks their current vendors first, your clearest value is making an existing subscription work harder.
3. Ask what a joint customer gains, not what a joint campaign gains. Co-marketing that produces a case study is fine. Co-marketing that produces an easier customer to serve survives a budget review.

Endear's own numbers on the AI Opportunity Engine show what one early deployment achieved: one specialty retailer went from 60 outreach messages a week to 360 in six weeks without adding headcount, with conversion holding steady and 35 dollars in attributed revenue for every dollar spent on actioned opportunities. Those are Endear's figures about an unnamed Endear customer, and attributed revenue counts purchases that follow a message, so it can overstate what the message caused. Read them as the vendor's own evidence rather than an industry benchmark. The structural point stands regardless: the constraint on clienteling was never writing speed, it was knowing who to write to.

The human step has stayed, at least by default. Endear's AI drafts and ranks, and a person reviews and sends. Three years after Madeleine first worried about big computers taking over, Endear's answer was a queue, not a replacement.

Frequently asked questions

Which Shoptalk does this recap cover?

Shoptalk 2023, held in Las Vegas in March 2023.

Is AI in retail partnerships just conference hype?

It was closer to hype in 2023, and it now shapes how some retailers evaluate vendors. In one February 2026 Modern Retail piece, several executives said they start from the business outcome and check what their existing vendors can already do before evaluating anything new.

Does AI replace clienteling software?

No, at least not at Endear. We built AI into the clienteling tool rather than displacing it, because the hard problem is ranking which customer to contact, and that needs the purchase, visit and preference data a CRM holds.

What should a partner manager do before a retail conference?

Book meetings in advance. Madeleine's most practical recommendation from 2023 still holds up: short pre-booked meetings put you in front of the brands and partners you came for, instead of hoping to meet them on the floor.

Who owns the customer when a shopper buys through an AI assistant?

Nobody has settled that. A Retail AI Council working group of retailers and technology providers formed in late 2025 to propose a shared standard for passing shopper context, such as loyalty, preference or intent, into third-party AI experiences.

Three years on, the useful thing about this recap isn't that it predicted AI would be big. Everyone did. It's that the partner instinct in it, that AI would speed up the boring work, still points at the right question. We haven't measured whether it changed co-marketing, which is what she was really predicting.