S2E8 Greg Buzek of IHL Group on the AI Hiring Gap the Retail Industry Got Backwards

For two years, every conference stage and every headline has told you the same thing. AI is coming for retail jobs. The robots are taking over. Store headcount is doomed. The data tells a completely different story, and it is not close.

In part two of our three-part AI in Retail series, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit back down with Greg Buzek, President and Chief AI Orchestrator at IHL Group, to take apart the doom narrative with hard numbers from IHL’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study. The retailers deploying the most AI in their stores are adding store associates at nearly double the rate of everyone else. Edge-current retailers plan to grow store headcount at 70% versus 36% for their peers. The fastest-growing retailers are 115% more likely to be adding people, not cutting them.

This is the augmented associate model, and it’s the through-line of the whole episode. The winning retailers treat AI as a tool to augment store associates rather than replace them. Greg traces it all the way back to self-checkout 25 years ago, when Kroger trained its best people to teach customers and then moved staff to fresh-food profit centers, while Kmart simply bolted in machines, cut labor, and flamed out. Same technology, opposite outcomes.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
·       The self-checkout history that predicts who wins and loses with AI in retail
·       Why store associates blame every staffing change on AI, and the over-communication fix that works
·       The augmented associate toolkit: voice in an associate’s native language, mobile devices, assisted selling, and instant order history
·       Why edge computing, not the cloud, is quietly deciding which retailers can scale AI in the store
·       The two things AI needs more than anything else: the network and clean data
·       How buy online pickup in store, returns, and last mile delivery are all adding store associates instead of removing them
·       Why roughly 18% of retail sales now run through reverse logistics, and where the margin recovery hides
·       The restaurant handheld lesson Greg has tracked for 15 years, and why turning tables twice as fast drops straight to the bottom line

Greg’s bottom line lands hard. The retailers cutting store associates to look efficient on a spreadsheet are the ones falling behind. The winners are connecting store associates to data, handing them better tools than the customer walks in with, and getting the store network right before anything else. If you make one retail workforce decision this year, this episode is the one to hear first.

Resource Links
How Retail Leaders Outperform – https://www.ihlservices.com/product/how-retail-leaders-outperform/
Shelf Intelligence Report – https://www.ihlservices.com/product/shelf-intelligence-report-rebuilding-retail-relationships-through-automation/
Adapt or Be Outpaced – https://www.ihlservices.com/product/adapt-or-be-outpaced-tech-imperative-for-retails-midmarket/
Fixing Inventory Distortion – https://www.ihlservices.com/product/fixing-inventory-distortion-whos-winning-whos-failing-whats-working/
Closing the Execution Gap – https://www.ihlservices.com/product/closing-the-execution-gap/

Support Our Sponsors
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

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About Our Guests
Greg Buzek. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbuzek/
IHL Group. https://www.ihlservices.com/
RetailROI. https://www.retailroi.org
Greg Buzek is the Founder, President and Principal Analyst of IHL Group, one of the most respected retail technology research firms in the world. IHL’s annual Retail Transformation Study is the largest survey of retail technology leaders in the industry, covering more than 400 brands across every retail segment. Greg is also the founder of Retail Orphan Initiative (Retail ROI), which this week surpassed $6 million in total grants to help children around the world through the industry’s Super Saturday campaign.

Noted by RIS News as one of the Top 10 Influentials in Retail and the National Retail Federation as one of “The List of People Shaping Retail’s Future“, he has a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, and 30 years of experience in retail market analysis, business planning, product development, and consulting with Fortune 500 companies. He is also a member of the Top 100 Retail Influencers from RETHINK Retail.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:40) Show Intro

(03:32) Welcome back, Greg Buzek!

(04:22) Self Checkout Lessons

(08:11) Augmented Associate Tools

(10:17) Voice and Language Support

(11:54) Edge Computing Advantage

(13:18) Network and Clean Data

(14:31) Enabling Tech and IT Spend

(16:25) Mobile Tools and Pickup Wins

(18:25) Last Mile Delivery Staffing

(21:24) Making the Investment Case

(23:16) Returns and Fulfillment Focus

(25:42) Restaurant Speed Example

(29:15) Key Takeaways and Wrap

(31:27) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 – 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.