Customerland

Personalization 2.0: What Happens When AI Meets Retail

• mike giambattista • Season 3 • Episode 13

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Ever wondered what technology investments actually make retail employees happier—not just more productive? Katie Riddle, Global Retail Strategy Lead at Verizon Business, reveals that while 98% of grocery retailers struggle with staffing challenges, the solution goes beyond efficiency tools.

"It's not just about making employees more efficient," Katie explains. "It's about providing a better experience that makes them want to stay." Through her unique position overseeing retail strategy at Verizon, Katie has a panoramic view of how leading retailers are using technology to transform both customer and employee experiences. From appointment-setting systems that help associates prepare for customer needs, to self-service kiosks that free staff for meaningful interactions, the right technology investments create environments where employees feel knowledgeable, empowered, and trusted.

The conversation takes us through retail's digital transformation journey—from pandemic-driven quick fixes to today's sophisticated integration of mobile technology with in-store experiences. By 2026, 42% of retailers plan to implement mobile apps with in-store features, more than doubling current adoption. These technologies enable what industry insiders call the "fidgetal" experience—a seamless blend of physical and digital interactions that enhances shopping journeys through real-time personalization.

Perhaps most fascinating is Katie's perspective on AI applications in retail. While artificial intelligence has been quietly optimizing inventory for years, generative AI is revolutionizing content creation and marketing, while "agentic AI" promises to transform operations and customer service. As Katie notes, "Your imagination is the limit to what it can do." This isn't just another overhyped technology—it's exceeding expectations and reshaping retail from the stockroom to the sales floor.

Want to understand the future of retail technology and its impact on both customers and employees? This conversation provides a masterclass in retail innovation from someone who bridges strategy, technology, and real-world implementation.

Katie Riddle:

I think sometimes it can be short-sighted to look at the employee experience as just efficiency how can we make them more efficient? But I think the other thing to really think about is, you know, the more tools that you're able to give employees that are smart and well thought out. Really, it's not just about making them more efficient. It's about really providing a better experience for them that makes them want to stay.

Mike Giambattista:

Katie Riddle is Global Retail Strategy Lead at Verizon Business and Katie and I had a chance to catch up at this year's NRF conference, had a brilliant but brief conversation about some of the things that Verizon is up to. But what ended up kind of bubbling to the surface of that conversation was how much Katie gets to see by virtue of her position in a very big company that could be of real interest to people who listen to and watch and read Customerland. So that was a terrible introduction. I just want to get to hey, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Katie Riddle:

Yeah, absolutely Pleasure to be here.

Mike Giambattista:

So maybe for context, if you could give us a little bit of what the global retail strategy lead at Verizon does, and then we can go from there, because I've got a whole list of things we should be talking about.

Katie Riddle:

Yeah, absolutely. So. I've been with Verizon about six years. I came from Target and from working with a couple of CPG manufacturers. I've done some consulting with Walmart, so really came from the retail industry and what I do for Verizon is sort of threefold, so you know, one is to really act as an overlay for our core enterprise sales and help them understand you know the context of the retail industry and really what are those business challenges that our customers are having to face every day and you know what are some of the holistic solutions that we can use to help them meet their business goals.

Katie Riddle:

The second thing would be, you know, help them meet their business goals. The second thing would be, you know talking to clients every day, talking to, you know, the biggest retailers to the smallest retailers and you know, really getting a good feel from them as to what they're facing and what they need from a company like Verizon. And then, lastly, I do a lot of interfacing with my colleagues over in the Verizon consumer group who do innovation in our own stores, because we have this, you know, 6,000 store. You know both owned and partner store. You know living lab, where we try a lot of things and we, you know, drink our own Kool-Aid, you know to that extent, and so you know really bringing that back into the work with the folks on the Verizon business side, as well as into the work with the customers, because that's usually the first thing that customers ask is well, what are you doing as a retailer?

Mike Giambattista:

So that's where we are.

Mike Giambattista:

Again, going back to our conversation at NRF. I'm sure it was the same way with you, but you know it's three days of just sprinting and a lot of conversations, a of these different directions in her history that seems to inform what's happening and what she sees beyond, just like, hey, here's my goal, here's what I have to do. In other words, I felt like the way you described your roles at Verizon and prior was really a multidisciplinary approach to being able to synthesize a lot of stuff, a lot of activity, a lot of data points, a lot of just observations, and I thought, well, on one level, I just want to talk to a person like that, because that's super interesting, but I think I think people who listen to and read customer land can really benefit from the kind of holistic perspective and dying to get into that and I know that's like it's a giant can of worms because it could take us anywhere. That's like it's a giant can of worms because it could take us anywhere, yeah, and like, by definition, it will take us like in all kinds of crazy places that our schedules don't have time for.

Mike Giambattista:

Having said that, though, why don't we just start with a couple of the kind of key data points from one of Verizon's recent reports and I thought I'd just kind of call out a handful of these items and we can discuss them. But I think you know it's one thing to just say, okay, that's our data point and move on with a little context, but the Katie Riddle perspective, I think, is going to be really, really interesting. Okay, item number one critical labor challenges drive technology investment and the high-level number here. Staffing remains one of the most pressing operational challenges. With 98% of grocery retailers and 88% of specialty retailers struggling with hiring and retention and you know there's way more that goes into that the impacts of those data points are giant just efficiency.

Katie Riddle:

How can we make them more efficient?

Katie Riddle:

So, of course, yes, you know, we want to make sure that our employees, you know, have the tools that they need and that they can, you know, have tools that help them switch from sort of low value tasks to high value tasks, which would be, like you know, interfacing with clients. But I think the other thing to really think about is the more tools that you're able to give employees that are smart and well thought out. Really, it's not just about making them more efficient, it's about really providing a better experience for them that makes them wanna stay, that gives them the tools that they need to feel knowledgeable, to feel fully able to help the customer, even from, you know, day one or day 10, you know, on the job, you know, feel like they can, you know, get off to a very quick start and have what they need in order to, you know, help the customer, to feel empowered, to feel trusted. I think those are things not to be underestimated and really are a bigger thing than just that efficiency story that we've been talking about with labor.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, we spend a lot of time on this side of things, talking about the emotional drivers behind certain decisions, a lot of that in the CX world and more and more now in the EX world employee experiences. I love that you're that you are articulating kind of the the context of these data points in terms of how you make the employees feel, because it is, you know, it's one thing to be more efficient, as you said, but to feel able to feel appreciated goes a long way, a long way to um, to improve retention, um and all of the other activities that go along with that, so that that's a big one Um, in your it's, you know, on the, let's just say, put on the Verizon lenses for a minute. So we've, there's the problem, there's the opportunity, um, how's, how's Verizon addressing it?

Katie Riddle:

So we have a variety of tools that we give our folks in stores. One of those actually came around during the pandemic but we've kept doing it as an appointment setting so that enables us to help you know kind of forecast how many people are going to come through the doors. And of course there's always people who are just walking in, just swinging by to pick up an accessory, in just swinging by to pick up an accessory. But that really helps the people in the stores the associates project. You know what they're going to need and maybe even take a look at the customer's records before they come in and see if they can identify okay, well, here's where the problem might be and really offer that you know more personalized service. So it enables them to service, you know, more customers than they maybe were able to. Personalized service so it enables them to service more customers than they maybe were able to service before. But it gives just a more holistic picture of each customer and leaves that associate feeling more prepared.

Katie Riddle:

We also did install some self-service kiosks in a lot of stores where you're able to go in and you're able to pay your bill or you're able to look at you know service.

Katie Riddle:

You know, and that means that if you walk in the door and you know the two or three employees who are staffing that store are busy with other customers, you can either start the journey, you know, on that self-service, you know kiosk or you know at least start looking around and, you know, using your phone and the Verizon app to interact in-store and really kind of find out and maybe narrow down on the accessory that you're looking for. So I think there's a lot of tools. You know, during the pandemic we were really proud that we were able to switch over people from in-store customer service to chat and telephone customer service very quickly, and I think that just speaks to the agility with which we look for those tools and look for that smart training and we use VR to train our employees, for example, for example. So I think these are all things that we use to make people feel valued and trusted and make them feel that we, you know, need to keep them on and that we have an investment in them.

Mike Giambattista:

It's so much of what happened that caused that, you know, that really quick transformation. During the pandemic, everybody moved to mobile very quickly because they had to, and I know that you've spoken about this and we've written about it extensively. Mobile was progressive and very good to have, but overnight it became absolutely critical and necessary. You no longer had a choice. You had to operate mobile, and I know that Verizon I wasn't close enough to it at the time, but it didn't look to me like Verizon really had to pivot all that much right then, because you're essentially a digital organization as it is. But I know a lot of organizations that were kind of like uh-oh, you know, we got a problem, now how do we do this? And a handful of them turned to Verizon for guidance and for technology on how to make that giant overnight pivot. It was something to behold for a lot of these people.

Katie Riddle:

Right, and it's still going on today. So there were a lot of changes that people, that companies made during COVID that you know were more or less what I what I call like, stuck together with sticks and spit, you know that were very, you know they served the purpose and were able to help them pivot quickly, but weren't really built for the long term. So digital transformation, you know, was kind of the watch word back then, but you know it is even more so now. There's a maturity that we're reaching, you know, in the next year or two, where digital transformation, you know, means breaking down silos, breaking down barriers. It means unifying, you know, data and you know customer information databases. It enables really everything else that we want to do.

Katie Riddle:

You know all of the fancy things like the personalization at scale and real time, and you know all of these other things that we have going on. So it's an evolution. But I think we're sort of at this crux period where we have a lot going on, a lot of new technology, but they have to really have be strong on the essentials, like the strong foundational network. You know that's very fast and low latency and high bandwidth and you know those are things that enable all of these new technologies like the scan and go or the virtual try ons or, you know, any of those things that just require a lot of compute in store.

Mike Giambattista:

I was thinking of one statistic in particular that your team had sent over by 2026, 42% of retailers plan to implement mobile apps with in-store features up from 19. Currently, 2026 is next year. That's a giant sprint, if you will, from current state to having something that's not just functional but genuinely useful and engaging Right there. Can we talk a little bit about how Verizon is enabling that particular sprint?

Katie Riddle:

Sure. Well, I mean, let's be honest. So people even prior to COVID, were using their mobile devices in store, whether that's to comparison shop to, you know, check out, you know specs, to check out pricing, to check out location in the store. So which aisle is this thing on? So I think you know more and more retailers are really enabling those features, knowing that people and there's this generational slant to it, so you know, sometimes you know different generations prefer to talk to people in person. Sometimes that is just the kiss of death that people want to use a kiosk or their phone, so it's enabling them to do that.

Katie Riddle:

So things like chat in store, you know, and app in store or wayfinding, or you know other things like that, you know we're providing not only the bandwidth that that takes up or even the network slicing that that takes, and network slicing allows you to separate your critical business operations from, say, your, your customer wifi, you know, or other different functions. You know we're able to help that. And then, with the chat, you know we have lots of CX offerings. You know, virtual call centers and other things that really are helpful in providing that chat experience in store that can just answer quick questions, that can answer you know where something is in store. That really again, that can answer where something is in store. That really again shifts that burden that's on the employees to answer these very common, repetitive questions. It can shift that burden over to something that's got either AI or machine learning enabled and allow them to be in front of customers, to be checking out customers and all of those things that provide a great customer experience.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, there's another hour's worth of conversation just to unpack that one, but I won't go there.

Katie Riddle:

Sure.

Mike Giambattista:

I want to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart and our readers and listeners here. It's the idea of personalization and where it's been, where it's come from, where it is now and where it's going. Where it's come from, where it is now and where it's going, my perspective and I think we even talked about this at NRF was that personalization has meant one thing for so long, and now that AI can enable so much more, it's about to change its definition. It's about to become something entirely different than what it was, and you can just use your imagination as to what that might look like. But boiling that down into a strategy and then boiling it further down into tactical execution really requires some. You know you got to roll up your sleeves, you got to really figure it out. One I'd love to know your perspective on you know where you see personalization going through Verizon's eyes, but then further how Verizon is kind of enabling some of those things.

Katie Riddle:

Sure, going back to what I was saying earlier about that digital transformation and really shattering those silos and those barriers between different functions of the business, between different functions of the business, between different, you know, informational databases, you know you've essentially got to have, you know, one or two big data lakes in order to have all of that information available that would enable you to customize for your consumers. And the other thing is too, you know we've had all this data all this time. We've been asking customers questions forever, so, but we've just not been able to do anything with that information because there just wasn't anything that could take on such vast amounts of data and make sense of it. So I think, with the onset of machine learning and AI, and even now generative AI and agentic AI, you know now you have the tools that you needed all along to really make sense of that data. And I think the ultimate you know place where it's going is very what was it? The minority report, where, you know maybe it's not as invasive as you're walking by and it says Hi Mike, you know, here's some shoes that to match that. That, you know, put those pants you bought last week. So maybe it's not quite that creepy. But what it is is. It is knowing where you are in a store in real time and being able to offer you information, offers, you know, content at that point of decision in real time.

Katie Riddle:

So it's I'm, you know, walking by a dress and you know H&M and I get you know sent something within the H&M app to my, you know. You know that says you know here's a video of that dress on a model on the runway, so you can see. You know. You know that says you know here's a video of that dress on a model on the runway, so you can see, you know how it floats and how it, you know, turns. Then there's also the hey. And then also, you know we are offering 25% off one item. We regular price item today.

Katie Riddle:

So you know, maybe the dress is what you want and you know it's at that moment where I'm just seeing the dress and thinking, oh okay, this adds context, this adds an experience around the shopping. You know experience in store that maybe was lacking before and maybe is a reason to go into the store versus just shopping online and maybe you can add some of that content and those offers and things online. But I think what it does is. It makes that watchword, the fidgetal, really happen.

Katie Riddle:

But I think it's the connectivity that you need, the bandwidth that you need, the low latency that you need to process that information. Use the low energy Bluetooth beacons to triangulate on the cell signal to know where I am in the store to you know. Have the store or the corporation, the retailer, know that that's me and match up my profile with that location information in the store. You know all of this stuff. It takes a lot of bandwidth and a lot of compute. So it's not even just the connectivity but it's having that edge compute with our different partnerships, with AWS and Google, you know, to have that, that compute near and not having to go ping a data center that could be hundreds of miles away in order to get that that thing happening in real time.

Mike Giambattista:

We talked to a lot of loyalty providers in this space who have been talking about personalization for so long, who are really excited about what AI is about to enable. But it's interesting you really never hear them talk about because it's really more on their side, much more about the mechanics of the loyalty program itself on their side, much more about the mechanics of the loyalty program itself, the monster amounts of bandwidth and compute power it takes to enable all this real-time interactivity. It can be daunting and I was talking to a couple of people there at NRF who had some really spectacular personalization offerings Just like wow, never really considered that you could do this kind of thing before and walked away from both those conversations going you know, do you just need like a data center in the back room to pull that off? You know, because that sounds basically impossible otherwise.

Katie Riddle:

Sure, yeah, I think so. And the nearer you have the compute, you know to that endpoint whether that's at the cell tower, whether that's in the back room, but hopefully it's not. You know your traditional data center that you're having to ping for every one of these requests. I think you know, from a sustainability perspective, a lot of companies who are providing this compute at the edge, you know, are really going to have to figure out how to do that. From a power minimization perspective, you know that's kind of this next big thing of you know we knew how much it was taking to mine Bitcoin and that was a great amount of power, but it's going to even be more power that needs to be generated to make AI work at the speed where it's effective and providing that personalization that we're talking about. So I think you can even take that a step further into the sustainability that most businesses are really striving for these days.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, that's another hour and a half long conversation, because it's interesting to me that you know we'll open up a conversation that has everything to do with a bottom line orientation for, you know, whatever the application happens to be, but very quickly kind of veers over into sustainability, because either their customers are looking for that kind of those kinds of proof points or because it's just like a bottom line imperative. I mean, we have to be sustainable because it costs too much to be otherwise, which is kind of a new development in our world. But you bring up a really good point and I would love to talk about this one in our remaining time is how people are deploying AI, how they're thinking about deploying AI and how Verizon is kind of advising them and enabling them along those paths, because there are just so many use cases for an enterprise retailer, I mean it's. So where do you start, kind of a thing. You know, how do you really prioritize this stuff?

Katie Riddle:

Yeah, it is hard. I think you know businesses have to identify what is business critical for them or where either is low-hanging fruit or those business critical things that you know they can't grow or scale without it getting faster or better. So I think to date we've seen you know AI being used in the backroom. You know in the. You know projecting inventory levels that are needed. You know automating. You know things like the inventory counts or you know using predict. You know predictability. You know using predictability the predictiveness, to count inventory almost virtually, almost by inference, rather than accounting each individual item and then marrying that back with POS data. So I think that's been happening in the back room for a while. I don't think that AI is new in that capacity. I think it's starting to get even better and better.

Katie Riddle:

I think where we're seeing Gen AI is kind of the new front runner thing is the idea of marketing materials. For instance, when I was at Target, one of my ownership responsibilities was around product content, product imagery, and some of that was, if it was a national brand was sent to us by whatever brand that was, but other owned brands like clothing, or now it's Good Gather. Those are all things that Target has to compile information, data points, create a narrative, do pictures? How many pictures do you need? So there's so many things that can be done with Gen AI these days. That wouldn't require the whole photo studio that I had at my disposal, that wouldn't require the teams of writers that you needed to make sense of taking product data and then creating an appealing narrative around that product data. And then creating an appealing narrative, you know, around that product data. So I often think, you know, my team would have been a lot smaller had we had Gen AI back then. And then the agentic AI. There have been some great commercials sort of demonstrating this lately.

Katie Riddle:

But, you know, looking for space on your calendar for a meeting and finding that for you, or knowing that you're supposed to attend an event outside and looking at the weather and signaling back to you, you know that, hey, maybe you need to reschedule this or those sorts of things. You know that's where we see AI, you know, starting to make a difference. But we also see, you know, so much sandbox activity going on within companies, using, you know, microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini and really just sort of playing around with okay, you can make me be able to do email faster or, you know, find those gaps in my calendar faster. There are so many things going on right now, you know, I think it. I think there's a lot of governance that is going to be required inside businesses to dictate what our policies are around AI, what our policies are around the data that we're using, you know using to teach it. You know what we're going to do with it. You know what functions are allowed to be touched by it versus others.

Katie Riddle:

I think there's plenty of people a lot smarter than me who are, you know, working on those within companies right now, and I think there's this spectrum of activities that are going on from. You know you've got Target and Walmart who've produced their own AI internal apps so that you know you as an employee can just ask it a question in plain language and it will answer you. There's that to hey, we're just trying out. You know, in other companies, hype in a lot of ways and will live up to the hype you know, even more so in the future, versus, like the metaverse, which you know had a lot of hype, didn't live as much up to it, you know, or just really the hype should have been around some very specific use cases and not just oh, it's going to solve all of our problems for a follow-up in, say, six, nine months or even a year, because of your perspective, especially on on what AI is doing right now, because that what was possible a year ago has exploded exponentially.

Mike Giambattista:

And I think the thing that that really impresses me about this is that, you know, not only is it, is it living up to the hype, as you said, but very often with me, I'm completely blown away by what it, by what it's capable of, depending on how it's deployed, like it's. There's no lack of hype here, because I think it just keeps exceeding it, you know, know, with the people behind it. So that'll be a fun conversation.

Katie Riddle:

I think it's really the your imagination is the limit to what it can do, and that's not to say it's a cure all. It is not a cure all, but yeah, I think we will be in a much different place, you know, six months a year from now. So, yeah, happy to happy to sit down again.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, I'll make sure that our teams are wrangling schedules again for that. But, katie, I really appreciate this. You know getting perspective and just you know, being able to sit and talk with someone who has this kind of multi-input view of the world, especially this world, is really interesting. So, thank you, I really appreciate it.

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