A View from NRF 2025: Is AI Part of Retail?

This IDC Perspective examines NRF 2025, a key retail event of the year from the view of artificial intelligence (AI) and advancements in AI. NRF 2025 brought forth almost 40,000 attendees and thousands of companies and organizations as part of the largest retail event worldwide with an enormous international contingent. Artificial intelligence has become a staple concern at this event as it has now become a mainstream capability critical to retail businesses. The ability to capture and convert AI into meaningful value still eludes many retailers and tech firms that support retail business applications. We are also seeing a division of AI into different forms that span predictive, generative, and more recently agentic AI. This document discusses the changes encountered by retailers and their counterparts in the primary trends around retail AI as evidenced at NRF 2025."AI in its many forms continues to be the honored guest at NRF, but retailers are now thinking about it differently. It's no longer about POC purgatory but practicality," says Ananda Chakravarty, VP of Research as part of IDC Retail Insights. "The next step for retailers is achieving profitability through their AI investments."