My year started off with a cornucopia of events – CES, the National Retail Federation show and the World Economic Forum in Davos — and though they’re three completely different events, there was one thread that cut across all of them: artificial intelligence. Like the internet did 30 years ago, AI will change the way we work, live, learn and play. However, also like the internet, AI will bring several new security threats, prompting organizations to rethink their cyber strategies.
As one would expect, artificial intelligence was a big theme at last week’s National Retail Federation’s annual event in New York City, as it was last year, but there was one subtle difference. The 2025 edition was focused more on AI education, whereas I felt this year’s NRF focused more on use cases. In fact, one of the speakers I saw said something to the effect that NRF is no longer a technology show but rather a business outcomes event.
As CES wound down, industry watchers are now turning their attention to the National Retail Federation show across the country in New York. Retail, once is slow moving industry, is now ripe with change and the in-store environments have become operationally more complex.
One of the highlights of the CES event last week was the Nvidia Corp. keynote delivered by Chief Executive Jensen Huang. Though there are many focal points to an event such as CES, the one pervasive theme is artificial intelligence, and no company has become more synonymous with AI than Nvidia. That’s why thousands of people queued up for hours in advance to hear the latest and greatest vision and product news from the company’s leader.
I’m a big fan of any technology that makes our lives easier. One example of this is Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which I consider to be the easiest check out experience available today. Customers tap their credit card on a reader, walk in a store, pick up whatever they want and then, as the name suggests, just walk out of the store and everything is charged to your account.