May 22, 2026

 

This Week


Own Your Media Network

Airline Model Reinvents Partnerships

Torchy’s Training Breakthrough

Schnucks’ Tech Adoption Lessons

Why Parcel Audits Count

Agentic Commerce, Real‑World View

Checkout Ads That Convert

Retail Media Isn’t About Joining a Network. It’s About Owning One.


CPGs aren’t looking for a convenience customer. They’re looking for your customer [PAR Retail].


​🔥AI Hot Take: Retailers don’t need more ad partners — they need more first‑party power. The winners are the ones who turn their own data into the network.

How the Retailer-Supplier Model is Transforming Airline Partnerships


Today’s travelers demand a truly seamless experience. One where the offer they’ve purchased is delivered reliably across their entire journey [Amadeus].


🔥AI Hot Take: You can’t build modern airline retail on legacy plumbing. Standardization is the only path to dynamic offers that work across the ecosystem.

Promotion

How Torchy's Achieved a 98% Training Completion Rate with Smarter Employee Enablement


To create a bigger sense of connection and make learning and culture more scalable, the team doubled down on what makes Torchy’s, Torchy’s [Wisetail].


🔥AI Hot Take: Frontline teams don’t resist training — they resist bad training. Torchy’s success shows that intuitive design beats enforcement every time.​

Six Lessons in Retail Technology Adoption and Change Management from Schnucks


​Two executives discuss what they learned along the way and what advice they would offer retailers implementing store intelligence technology today [Simbe].


🔥AI Hot Take: Retail tech doesn’t fail because it’s new — it fails because teams aren’t ready. Schnucks proved adoption is a culture strategy, not a deployment plan.

What is a Parcel Audit? Does Your Shipping Operation Need One?


You can’t control rising shipping costs, but you can recover the money you’ve already spent [Reveel].


🔥AI Hot Take: Carriers don’t raise rates quietly; they raise them creatively. Parcel audits are the only way to see the real cost of shipping.

Notable Numbers

Welcome to the Frontier. You’re Early.


By Mike Lukianoff, Founder & CEO, SignalFlare.ai

What Agentic Commerce Looks Like in Practice: Insights from Five Leading Retailers


Five retail brands share their strategies, challenges, and the questions they haven't answered yet [Adyen].


🔥AI Hot Take: The future of retail isn’t predictive — it’s proactive. Agents that act on signals in real time will define the next generation of winners.

Promotion

What Are the Benefits of Advertising During Checkout?


They include high-intent reach, incremental revenue, efficient customer acquisition, first-party measurement, and faster testing [Rokt].



🔥AI Hot Take: Checkout isn’t the end of the journey — it’s the peak of intent. No other ad placement has shoppers this ready to act.

The National Restaurant Show Seen

Robots, Robots, Everywhere


You don’t spot them in restaurants much today, but after what we saw at last week’s NRA Show, that may soon change [Pictured: Attendees viewing one option from Zox Robotics].

Retail

Foodservice

Mfg/DTC

Supply Chain

Hospitality

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