Cordial Connect NYC hot takes: The truth about AI shopping

At Cordial Connect during NRF, we hosted a fireside chat that cut through the AI hype with some refreshing honesty. Boot Barn CEO John Kossoff, Publicis’ Jason Goldberg, and Cordial’s Matt Holland sat down to discuss what’s actually happening with AI in retail, not what the press releases claim.

The new checkout

Despite breathless headlines about AI shopping agents, most of it isn’t happening yet. At least not the way you think.

John put it bluntly: his teenagers shop at thrift stores and make fun of how much he uses AI. They’re not using ChatGPT to buy products. And when AI does make predictions? Well, it recently forecast that the Cincinnati Bengals would win the 2036 World Series.

The hard truth? AI accuracy in commerce isn’t where it needs to be. In retail, 80% accurate doesn’t cut it. You need 100%. You can’t be sort-of right about inventory, pricing, or promo codes.

What actually matters

Jason Goldberg made the most important point of the conversation: we’re measuring the wrong thing.

Everyone’s obsessing over whether the robot completed the transaction. But that’s like saying the only valuable retail experience is the POS system.

The real change? AI is changing the path to purchase. Discovery. Research. Consideration. Replenishment. All the moments before the buy button that actually determine what ends up in your cart.

This is what we should mean when we talk about agentic commerce, not just robots checking out, but AI fundamentally reshaping how consumers find, evaluate, and decide what to buy.

The marketing funnel is dead (it always was)

Jason dropped another truth bomb: the marketing funnel has never actually been true. It’s been a useful fiction for over 100 years, helping us organize one-to-many marketing at scale.

But consumers don’t move in straight lines. They jump around unpredictably. The path you take to choose a car is completely different from how you buy toilet paper or replenish your coffee addiction.

AI’s real promise: Finally letting us meet customers where they actually are, not where our neat diagrams say they should be.

Why retailers need context, not just transactions

Matt highlighted the alphabet soup of protocols emerging: ACP, UCP, agentic payments, and more. Most of them are focused on transactions within walled gardens.

But here’s the problem: LLMs are synthesis engines, not reality engines. They make stuff up. The solution isn’t better checkout protocols. It’s better context.

That’s why Cordial launched the Shopper Context Protocol—because transactions without a relationship is just another Amazon marketplace. Retailers need to maintain their customer relationships, and that requires giving AI agents the right context in real-time.

Context brings relationship. And relationship is what retailers actually want.

The uplink changes everything

AI doesn’t just enable better outputs. It provides better inputs.

Before, you tracked clicks and add-to-carts. Now you have an uplink of actual intent. Customers having conversations through discovery. You can understand the why behind the purchase, not just the what.

“I want new boots for the Houston rodeo” tells you infinitely more than “clicked on boots category page.” And when you understand why, you can actually help them navigate that journey.

Where the real action is 

While everyone debates consumer-facing AI, the quiet revolution is happening behind the scenes.

Boot Barn’s been running “Cassidy” in stores for two years—helping associates instantly find products and answer customer questions. Because all that knowledge living in the digital world? Associates need access to it, too.

Employee enablement. Shift trading automation for 1.6 million Walmart associates. Roombas doing nightly cycle counts instead of humans spending the night in stores. Knowledge management that actually works.

This is where AI delivers ROI today, not theoretical shopping agents.

The standard that actually matters

Cordial’s approach to AI agents focuses on the jobs-to-be-done framework from email production, creative personalization, and optimization. But here’s the catch: agents are incredibly easy to build and terrible to build well.

Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write an email. Getting an agent with proper evals, guardrails, and deterministic processes that meet your specific brand guidelines? That’s hard. And what’s good for Boot Barn isn’t what’s good for every other retailer.

The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most AI. They’ll be the ones with the most thoughtful AI built around real jobs, real constraints, real brand standards.

What this means in 2026

Stop waiting for the AI shopping revolution to arrive fully formed. It’s already here, just not in the ways the headlines suggest.

Focus on:

• Discovery over transactions – How are you showing up when AI helps consumers find products?
• Context over conversion – Are you feeding agents the real-time data they need to be accurate?
• Relationship over reach – How do you maintain customer connection when AI enters the journey?
• Intent over tracking – What can the uplink of customer conversations tell you about the why?

The uncomfortable truth? We’re still early. The robots aren’t taking over checkout anytime soon. But they’re absolutely changing how consumers discover, research, and decide.

And that’s the battle that actually matters.

Want to explore how Cordial helps brands navigate AI’s impact on customer relationships? Let’s talk.