Months before the ball even dropped, our experts were analyzing the trends they believed would shape the retail and commerce landscape in 2025. To confirm the hypotheses, we attended NRF: Retail’s Big Show in New York City. Namely, Justin Racine, Principal of Commerce Strategy, and Zach Zalowitz, Principal of Order Management, attended and shared their preliminary thoughts for the 2025 show. When the dust settled, two major themes emerged.
The first theme is brands humanizing experiences with their consumers. Justin Racine explained that he had heard a lot about this during 2024, with organizations beginning to emulate niche brands by creating and cultivating consumer communities. This involves bringing together like-minded people who share interests and products, fostering a herd culture where they can share buying experiences and personal lives. In 2025, it looks like these brands are all-in on this approach.
The second theme is agentic AI, especially focusing on AI acting without human intervention. This trend may sound more like science fiction, but we’re already so close to an age where AI understands your buying behaviors and automatically purchases products for you. For example, in the cosmetics space, AI could learn your preferences for products like lipstick or eyeliner based on past purchases, engaged content, and social media activity, and start ordering these products for you automatically.
Let’s dive into what they saw at the show that confirmed their suspicions.
The Big Show’s Big Takeaways
Before taking on a full day at the show, Perficient hosted a breakfast with our partner Coveo – leader in smart search — for a morning mix-and-mingle event. The topic? To discuss how AI is reshaping the future of e-commerce and consumer experience. Coveo’s smart search capabilities have greatly improved B2C commerce sites that have had poor search relevance, and we have partnered with them to generate conversions by leveraging multiple complex AI models for optimized merchandising, product placement, and page views. This in turn has driven billions of desktop and mobile views for various brick-and-mortar and online retailers – an incredible advancement that will continue to grow in 2025.
During the show, there was an emphasis on AI, specifically around customer experience and operational innovation AI use cases. This was exemplified during Nvidia’s session about Real-World AI. They’ve built some incredible AI-backed programs, particularly around digital twins for some of the world’s largest brands: L’Oréal, Walmart, and Lowe’s. From their work with L’Oréal’s creative team to speedily deliver new campaigns, to their project for crucial forecasting of inventory for accurate and efficient supply chains at Walmart, Nvidia’s AI initiatives were some of the most cutting-edge use cases we’ve seen to date.
As Justin and Zach walked the NRF show floor, they met with brands and vendors to get their thoughts on the year ahead. Rohit Goyal, CEO of inriver, expressed hope that in 2025 we’ll start to see real deployments of AI, along with value at scale. Dominick Miserandino, CEO of RetailWire, expressed that we’re getting used to AI, we’re familiar with it, and we’re not surprised when it gives us really bad or good answers. He believes because of this normalization of AI, we should start to see greater implementation in the year to come. Kristen Naragon, Chief Strategy Officer of Akeneo, highlighted that 2025 is the year of AI in product experiences. She noted that business innovation will have to occur, especially surrounding the use of customer data and employee .
NRF 2025 highlighted two pivotal trends, the humanization of consumer experiences and the rise of agentic AI, with both set to transform the retail and commerce landscape in the years to come. As brands continue to focus on creating community-driven interactions and AI leads the way for smarter, enhanced interconnected organizational capabilities, e-commerce is poised for significant innovation.
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