Retail's New Rules: Emotion, AI, Creators

Speakers: Jordan Broggi, EVP Customer Experience; Angie Brown, EVP & CIO – The Home Depot 

Home Depot’s leadership were clear: the AI making the biggest difference is the kind customers never see. Their ”order intelligence” system analyses delivery patterns in real time – identifying roads too narrow for a flatbed, flagging missing gate codes, rerouting before problems occur. The customer receives their delivery on time. They never know why it worked. 

With $25 billion in transaction revenue on homedepot.com, Home Depot runs a multi-partner AI strategy across OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft – with no intention of picking a single winner. The strategic priority is owning the data layer and the customer experience above it. ”We are being very thoughtful on data residency,” said Brown. 

Their Magic Apron assistant, launched late 2024, is gaining traction precisely because it earns its place – answering specific technical questions on product pages rather than interrupting browsing journeys. The lesson: AI earns trust by being genuinely useful in the right moment, not by being visible everywhere. 

Speaker: Hillary Super, CEO – Victoria’s Secret & Co. 

Hillary Super inherited one of retail’s most polarising brands and made a counterintuitive move: she stopped competing on price. Victoria’s Secret had drifted into heavy promotions chasing a value market it was never positioned to win. Super pulled back. Store traffic still outpaced the wider mall consistently for over nine months. 

Her conviction: intimacy retail is among the most emotionally charged categories in existence. Associates, some with 41 years of tenure, are trained to handle those moments – a teenager’s first bra, a new mother’s fitting – with genuine care. ”We are building lifelong customers through in-life experiences,” she stated. 

She also separated Victoria’s Secret and Pink back into distinct brand identities after they had been quietly merged. Two brands, two calendars, two innovation pipelines. That separation, she argued, is precisely what makes a $7 billion revenue figure structurally possible. 

Speakers: Jessica Alba, Founder – The Honest Company; Travis Katz, GM & VP Shopping – YouTube 

Jessica Alba built the Honest Company before ”creator economy” existed as a term – two to three years of community-building before the company even launched. Her operating model: a tiered creator strategy from high-profile founders down to everyday consumers, strict brevity in briefs (maximum three talking points), and a deliberate preference for imperfect content. Their most viral posts? A dirty sink. Laundry from a long week. 

Travis Katz provided the scale: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are watched on YouTube every single day. Creator-led videos convert 30% better than traditional ad creative, often at lower cost than agency production. AI-powered creator matching, now live through Google Gemini inside YouTube Studio, allows brands to find aligned voices with a single prompt. 

The implication for retailers is structural: the purchase decision is increasingly made in the content layer, before the customer reaches any storefront – physical or digital.

Across home improvement, fashion, and consumer goods, the same pattern holds. Price is a race to the bottom. Promotions erode brand equity. The retailers gaining ground are those building emotional authority, using AI to invisibly remove friction, using stores to deliberately create connection, and using creators to earn trust at scale before the transaction ever begins. 

The question for every retail executive leaving Shoptalk is the same: where is your brand winning on emotion, not just efficiency?