Looking for even more actionable ideas from the 2026 Growth Show? We’ve gathered another collection of CommerceNext Steps from sessions at the Growth Show, featuring practical strategies and insights shared by today’s leading retail and DTC executives.
Check out the takeaways from this year’s Growth Show sessions:
Not Another Brand Talk: The New Growth Model for Marketers Under Pressure
Christine Schrader, VP, Strategic Innovation, WPromote
- Name your gap. Is it awareness, consideration, or connection? If you don’t know, that’s the first problem.
- Define success. Before your next campaign, decide what success looks like in 30 days and choose a leading metric to watch.
- Prove your spend. Identify one brand metric your finance team would actually care about and bring it to the next budget conversation.
Research-Backed Insights on Omnichannel Transformation
Megan Hostetler, Global Head of Content Marketing, Marketing Solutions, SAP Engagement Cloud
- The engagement gap is real and AI is the only way to close it. Audit your customer lifecycle and see where you have a data gap.
- Unified data is what separated AI experiments from AI that executes. Ask to join a service team monthly all-hands call.
- Loyalty is built in moments, and AI can deliver those moments at scale. See if any campaigns could be improved by including ERP signals.
Turning Store Signals into Smarter Marketing and Personalization OR The Unified Commerce Backbone: Making AI and Agentic CX work Across Channels
Amanda Carroo, Global Director of Digital Americas, Fjallraven
Sharon Gee, SVP of Product & AI, Feedonomics
- Audit your catalog. Identify where data is sparse, inconsistent, or missing the attributes LLMs need to answer shopper queries.
- Enrich for agents, not just for channels. Conversational attributes, brand voice, AEO-ready content are table stakes for AI discoverability.
- Get your catalog into the emerging protocols. You don’t need to build integrations yourself; partners can handle the mapping.
How Retail Data Is Rewiring Full Funnel Marketing
Heather Savatta, Product Marketing, Albertsons Media Collective
Joshua Nathan, Sr. Director, Retail Data Partnerships, The Trade Desk
Collin Colburn, VP, Commerce & Retail Media, IAB
- From targeting → prediction. Retail data will predict future demand, not just react to past purchases
- From campaign optimization → business optimization. Media decisions tied directly to inventory, pricing and supply chain signals
- From retailer-specific → AI powered agentic systems. Clean rooms, identity layers and product catalogs will allow brands to use retail data seamlessly across partners
Welcome Back, Stranger: The Power of Large Interaction Models
Noah Maffitt, Chief Growth Officer, Product Genius
Jeff Haddox, CTO, Omni Retail Enterprises
- Use AI as a leadership tool, not just an efficiency tool. Don’t delegate AI to operations alone—bring it into how you set strategy, prioritize work and communicate direction.
- Lead adoption by building trust, not just rolling out tools. Focus less on the technology and more on how people feel using it.
- Redesign how work gets done, not just where AI fits in. Re-think workflows across functions. Evolve your leadership style to focus on orchestration.
Using AI to Turn Shopper Behavior into Revenue Driving Actions
Jackie Diette, Sr. Director Ecommerce, Design Within Reach, MillerKnoll
Seth Levine, Head of AI Innovation, Contentsquare
- Don’t be afraid of AI. There is a story in your data. AI helps you find it. AI won’t replace your instincts; it removes the noise so you can act on the signals that actually drive revenue.
- AI + humans. AI accelerates the analysis, but humans drive the strategy. AI-powered research tools help anyone on your team, not just analysts, ask better questions and get to insights faster.
- Prompt like a pro. The quality of the answer is determined by the quality of your question. If you don’t know how to prompt, try asking the agent to guide you through the steps or information they will need.
- Consider the entire journey. From clicks to conversations: it’s critical to understand what’s happening across channels to really understand your customer and serve them the experience they love, seek and deserve.
Tactical Talk: AI Across the Ecommerce Funnel: From Discovery to Delivery
Winning the Shopper Journey with Agentic AI
Adam Colasanto, Director of GTM for Agentic Products, CommerceIQ
- Create unified context. Work with a platform that combines media, shelf and sales in a single view. More context, better decisions and no hand-offs between tools.
- Make transparent decisions. Use an agentic platform that provides visibility into recommendations so your team knows why, not just what.
- Keep human control. AI handles execution at algorithm speed. Your team sets the strategy and stays in the driving seat.
Unlocking New Paths to Customer Growth with NOBULL
Dan Luise, Sr. Manager, Performance Marketing, NOBULL
Aubrey Gutierrez, Partnerships Manager, Retail & Commerce, Connexity
- Do more than optimize existing channels. Efficiency and scale are not the same problem.
- Traditional affiliate has structural limits. New gifting and content models offer increased opportunities.
- Incremental growth requires incremental thinking. Reaching new customers means showing up in new places,
Meet the Invisible 95% on Your Website
Jeff Wender, CRO, Minty
- Don’t discount the 95%. Concentrating on consumers “you know” leaves an enormous opportunity on the table.
- “Scarcity” increases consumer value. As more consumers use AI for discovery, strategies to capture anonymous traffic are even more critical.
- Purchase intent is the best indicator. Identifying & engaging consumers demonstrating high-purchase intent surpasses traditional audience outreach.
Inside the Self-Optimizing Storefront: AI, Testing and Velocity
Edek Wasilewski, Senior Director – Enterprise & Strategic Partnerships, Fastr
- Your best growth lever isn’t a channel. It’s a feedback loop. Build systems where every tactic teaches the next. A campaign that can’t learn is just an expense.
- The team that tests fastest wins. It’s not about who spends the most. It’s about who can learn and adjust the most times each quarter.
- Treat every touchpoint as a question, not a broadcast. Listen at scale. Turn your marketing into a learning engine, not a megaphone.
If Everyone’s Optimizing, Why Isn’t Everyone Winning?
Christian Backe, Sr Account Executive, Quantcast
- Don’t let channel-first thinking limit performance. Focus on business outcomes first and allow AI to optimize across channels to drive stronger results.
- Optimize for one specific outcome. Don’t squeeze a range of organizational KPIs into AI channel optimization, focus on a core goal to achieve a stark uplift in performance.
- Don’t look at channels narrowly. Make sure your CTV, display, video and native strategies and performance metrics are interconnected to your goals.
Direct Mail, Reinvented: Trends and Insights Driving Data-Backed Results
Teju Prabhaka, Co-Founder & CEO, Share Local Media
- Frequency can help response rate, and smart DM providers will analyze performance by touchpoint.
- The best-performing format is the one that aligns the message, audience and brand experience.
- Offers in DM almost always prove effective, but there are a variety of strategies to balance.
- Profitability sometimes comes from what you don’t send. Gaps in suppression logic can lead to substantial wasted spend and reduced efficiency.
- Direct mail gives the consumer the power to experience your brand visually and through touch. Take advantage of it.
The conversation doesn’t stop here. As retail continues to evolve, the brands that stay ahead will be the ones that keep learning, testing and adapting.
Join us at the 2027 CommerceNext Growth Show to hear from the industry’s top innovators, discover fresh strategies and connect with the leaders redefining the future of retail.
