The Dirty Martini Archives

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Dirty Martini Newsletter

OKAY…. NRF - Down. Euroshop - Down. FMI - Down. Shoptalk - Down. Q1 was a whirlwind. As we see it, despite the continued uncertainty in the macro environment, retailers, brands, and those that serve them are making decisions and business is getting done.

AI, like any tech revolution, must balance the ‘blue sky’ representation from the Tech community with the skepticism and ‘wait & see’ attitude of the operator community. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. However, one thing is for sure - this tech revolution is moving at lightning speed. Advances in capabilities are happening in weeks and months vs. months and years. Our business included.

As always, this newsletter is designed to provide you with help and guidance on where the industry is going and how B2B marketers can more effectively keep up with the pace of change.

Enjoy this issue of the Dirty Martini Digest.

The Dirty Details

For the fourth year running, Incisiv and Manhattan have partnered to launch the Unified Commerce Benchmark Study. The study has expanded to 400+ specialty retailers, including 90 from EMEA, 60 from LATAM, and 250 from the US. The methodology includes real transactions and interactions including purchases, returns, and customer service in both the physical and digital channels.

The headline? Unified commerce has entered its separation era: a tiny leadership tier is compounding growth while the rest of the market gets dragged into a faster-moving baseline, with AI widening the gap instead of closing it. Let's dive in…

Only 7% of specialty retailers have achieved true unified commerce leadership.

The headline is not “everyone needs to be omnichannel.” It is that the market is separating into a tiny leadership tier and everyone else is either trying to catch up or has determined that their version of omnichannel is unique to them because of their model or format.

What it means for B2B Marketers:

• Segment your market by maturity, not vertical. Most retailers are still buying foundations. Your messaging, proof points, and offers should look different for Basic/Developing versus Advanced/Leading.
• Sell the “next step,” not the end state. Retailers outside the 7% need a clear progression plan, with measurable milestones. Make your content, and sales play a ladder to maturity stages.

Retailers with Advanced and Leading maturity deliver median conversion rates of 2.4% and 2.1%, versus 1.0% for Basic peers.

This is the cleanest proof from the study that unified commerce is not a brand story. It is a revenue mechanism. Leaders win the sale upstream of checkout by bridging browsing and buying with real-time engagement and fewer dead ends.

What it means for B2B Marketers:

• Bring a conversion narrative to every asset. Case studies, webinars, and one-pagers should map capabilities to conversion drivers like inventory confidence, personalization, and service continuity.
• Arm sales with a simple benchmark line. “Here’s the conversion delta between Basic and Advanced.” It gives sellers a clean opener and a reason to prioritize action now.

Unified commerce leaders grow 2X faster than Basic peers, with a 3-year CAGR of 3.8% vs. 2.1% (2022–2025).

The data shows a clear correlation: maturity progression is a compounding advantage, not a one-time lift. Leaders are not just growing faster. They are also building resilience.

What it means for B2B Marketers:

• Reframe the buyer’s mindset from “project” to “compounding advantage.” Your approach should emphasize that maturity progression creates sustained growth, not a one-time lift.
• Position your solution as acceleration, not transformation. Retailers want momentum. Show how you help them move from Developing → Advanced, where the payoff is strongest.

The total incremental revenue growth from Basic → Leading is $17M for every $1B in revenue.

This is the CFO-friendly anchor. It translates “maturity” into an order-of-magnitude ROI conversation. Retailers must be looking at specific value levers the report highlights: conversion, AOV, fulfillment precision, inventory turn, and service outcomes.

What it means for B2B Marketers:

• Give marketing a CFO-friendly ROI anchor. Use this data to justify budget, build business cases, and shift stakeholder conversations from “tool” to “financial imperative.”
• Connect your offer to specific value levers. Map your differentiators to conversion, AOV, inventory turn, fulfillment precision, and churn outcomes so the $17M feels achievable, not abstract.

Leadership is a smaller club in the AI era: 38% of 2024 differentiating capabilities became table stakes by 2026, and fewer than 5% of retailers offer dynamic, real-time personalization powered by GenAI.

This is the market timing discussion. Capabilities commoditize fast, and the frontier is shifting toward AI-driven and predictive experiences. But the report also makes the constraint clear: AI amplifies the unified commerce foundation, it does not replace it.

What it means for B2B Marketers:

• Create urgency around the moving frontier. Your narrative should be “capabilities commoditize fast,” so the cost of delay is falling behind the new baseline.
• Position GenAI as an amplifier of foundations. Avoid “AI magic.” Sell the prerequisite backbone (data, inventory, orchestration) and then the AI layer that compounds impact.

The data from this study is deep — we'll continue to share insights in the next edition. To access the full report, [download the Unified Commerce Benchmark Study here].

Straight from the Shaker: What to Look For When Evaluating AI Tools

Get practical insights and best practices straight from our industry experts as we shake up and serve up our knowledge to help you improve your go-to-market strategies. We share tips each month to help you stay ahead of the game.

The race is on to figure out how to use AI Tools to add efficiency to almost every function inside an enterprise, including marketing. AI tools are proliferating faster than most organizations can evaluate them. However, without the right framework, it's easy to adopt tools that produce noise at scale rather than intelligence that actually moves the business forward.

Here are the critical factors to assess before committing.

Does it know your industry or just the internet?

• Generic AI trained on broad web data will give you generic outputs. The most important question to ask any AI tool vendor is: where does the intelligence actually come from? Tools grounded in verified, practitioner-sourced, industry-specific data produce materially different results than those scraping the public web.
• If your buyers are retail CDOs, grocery operators, or CPG executives, the AI informing your workflows needs to reflect their reality vs. a watered-down average of every industry at once. Depth of industry context isn't a feature. It's the foundation.

Is the intelligence current or already stale?

• A tool is only as good as its inputs, and inputs decay. Market conditions shift, competitive dynamics evolve, and buyer priorities change seemingly on a weekly basis! An AI tool running on a static dataset from 6-12-18 months ago isn't giving you intelligence, it's giving you a dated perspective.
• Look for tools built on continuously updated inputs, where new research, new data, and new signals are actively incorporated. Real-time or near-real-time updating isn't a nice-to-have; it's the difference between a tool that helps you lead a market and one that helps you describe it

Where is the human in the loop?

• Automation at scale is only valuable when it's trustworthy. Without structured human oversight, AI workflows produce errors that compound. The best implementations keep domain experts in the process to catch the edge cases, validate the outputs, and ensure the intelligence layer remains accurate.
• Ask vendors specifically how human review is built into their workflow, and where accountability lives when the tool gets something wrong. The goal isn't AI replacing judgment. It's AI making human judgment faster and better-informed.

Evaluating AI tools isn't about finding the flashiest demo. It's about finding the intelligence infrastructure that makes your people and your automated workflows credibly, consistently smarter.

It just so happens that Incisiv has built such systems. Happy to chat if interested.

Dive deeper into our cross-industry research and content.

Last month, we released a new report — When Personalization Stops Being Personal: Rethinking AI for Customer Experience

Personalization is having its “AI moment” in retail, but the early wins have been largely about efficiency: faster recommendations, more automated service, more predicted next steps.

This paper argues the next battleground is different. Customers are not rewarding speed alone. They are rewarding understanding, and they are punishing systems that feel opaque, tone-deaf, or manipulative.

The takeaway for retailers is straightforward: if your personalization stack is built to optimize transactions, it will eventually erode trust. The next wave is about building unified customer intelligence, designing for transparency and control, and orchestrating AI and humans so the experience feels coherent, not automated.

The playbook offers key recommendations four themes:

1. Stop treating personalization as a conversion machine. Start treating it as relationship intelligence.

• AI optimized purely for speed and efficiency can increase throughput while eroding customer satisfaction, because it fails the moment the customer is in “discovery” or “aspiration” mode, not “task completion” mode. Retailers need architectures that can match tempo to intent, not force speed everywhere.

2. Trust is now a first-order constraint on AI ROI.

• 43% of consumers distrust GenAI due to accuracy and transparency concerns. This is deemed a ‘trust recession’. If customers do not understand why they are seeing a recommendation, even accurate personalization can feel manipulative. Retailers should prioritize explainability and customer control (clear reasons, preference refinement, and learning from rejection signals).

3. Most retailers do not have the foundation required for “real” AI personalization.

• 58% of retailers assessed operate below 50% customer experience maturity, which signals that many programs are running on fragmented data and partial context. Without unified, real-time customer intelligence across touchpoints, personalization engines optimize isolated moments and miss the broader relationship context that determines relevance.

4. Hybrid AI + human wins, but only if the handoff preserves context.

• 54% of retailers report higher satisfaction when combining AI automation with live human support. The catch is that the “handoff” often fails because customers have to repeat themselves. Retailers should design service orchestration so context persists across AI and human interactions, and across sessions, not just within a single chat.

Read the full Market Snapshot: When Personalization Stops Being Personal: Rethinking AI for Customer Experience

JELLO SHOT!!

We all just came back from Shoptalk Spring. We honestly didn’t know what to expect, as some of our clients have cut back on the show. Well - the vibe was great, and the show has mojo. However, the mojo is changing. We’ll explain more below.

First, let’s provide some key highlights we picked up from an industry perspective:

1. AI is moving from pilot to impact: Leaders are focused on real ROI across cost, speed, and experience.

2. The funnel is collapsing: AI-driven discovery is compressing the path to purchase and raising the bar on data and decisioning.

3. Creator-led commerce is driving demand: Authenticity and trust are outperforming traditional channels.

4. Stores are becoming data engines: Physical retail is fueling insight, not just transactions.

5. Execution is everything: Fulfillment, delivery, and returns now define the customer experience.

If this week reinforced anything, it’s that retail isn’t just evolving, it’s being rebuilt in real time.

Now, how about that Mojo? In the age of AI, what is the flex that caught our eye most obviously? Experiences are back! We noticed that there were more off-floor activities - breakfasts, suites, cabanas, cocktail parties, dinners, golf, race track events, the list goes on - than ever before.

While NRF is 6x bigger, the vibe at that event was that the vendor community was only investing in activities that have the best chance to lead to direct ROI. Building relationships was lower on the list. That changed at Shoptalk. And thank God, when everyone is pushing automation and the reduction of humans in the loop, human interaction is proving to be MORE important, not less.

Of course, that doesn’t make it easier on those of use hosting events as the retailers had a gazillion (yes, that’s a word) options to choose from, but nonetheless, we believe community is the key to it all.

Second Round - Incisiv on the Road…..

Second quarter is chock full of activity. We hope to see you at one or more of these industry events.

Incisiv is partnering with The Lead Summit, May 20-21, in New York City! The Lead Summit brings 3,000+ attendees and 150+ speakers from brands and retailers such as Primark, Steve Madden, Columbia, SHEIN, Marquee Brands, David Yurman, and many more!

Brand and Retail friends of Incisiv are welcome to attend for FREE! Please add our name in the ‘how did you hear about us’ field when you register!

We’re thrilled to share this special offer for retailers, you can register HERE.

For Non-Brand, Non-Retail friends, you can register HERE for 25% off:

See you May 20-21 in NYC!

Incisiv is heading to Berlin in partnership with the World Retail Congress. Incisiv and WRC have partnered to produce several studies, and next month, we will be releasing the Global Supply Chain Resilience Study (in conjunction with Anaplan) at the event and will be previewing our first annual Global Retail CXO outlook (in conjunction with Manhattan Associates). If you’re looking to network with a CXO audience, you should definitely check out this event!!

(SOLD) New York Community Dinner Series: In 2026, we will be producing four unique executive dinners designed to spark conversation and build community. Starting in May and in each subsequent quarter, we’ll select a critical industry theme and use that as the discussion driver.

• The Rise of the Agents (Sold): Where is Agentic AI going and which use cases will deliver the most value to your business?
• Bringing the sexy back to the store (Sold): What is the right mix of art and science in the store environment, and how important are the people who run it?
• What does digital transformation even mean anymore? (Sold): The state of the union in which digital technologies are continuing to impact e-commerce, supply chains, and stores.
• Whose supply chain is it anyway? (Sold): Few functions have risen to more importance than Supply Chains. How can a healthy supply chain make an impact on margins and provide a better customer experience?

We are offering the opportunity for one partner per event to join us. For more information, contact Mara Dosso at mara.dosso@incisiv.com

Incisiv is heading to Shoptalk Europe — and we're going all in.

• On Stage, our Chief Insights Officer, Gaurav Pant, is moderating "Going 'Glocal': Global Ambition, Local Execution" — a session built for retailers and consumer brands navigating international growth. How do you stay globally authentic while becoming locally relevant? Gaurav and leaders from Vuori and ETAM will break it down with a practical framework for scaling with both ambition and precision. Thursday, June 11 | 9:50–10:30 AM | Track 4: Growth Models & Markets
• The Speakeasy at Shoptalk Europe 2026 — An Executive Dinner: We're hosting an intimate evening for senior retail leaders on June 10 at Nobu Barcelona, in partnership with Manhattan Associates and Braze. We have 1 sponsorship left! Expect sharp conversations, great company, and zero fluff. Learn more here: https://www.incisiv.com/speakeasy-shoptalk-europe-2026

For more information on the final sponsorship, contact Mara Dosso at mara.dosso@incisiv.com

Not registered yet? Join us in Barcelona — use our link for 15% off your pass: https://register.visitcloud.com/survey/1gqkzd9ox4298?actioncode=MARKETINGKASSENSZONE

If you're attending, let's connect. Drop a comment, send us a DM, or find us on the floor.

Client Conference Round up - Here’s where some of the Incisiv Team will be in Q2 - If you’re headed here, reach out and we’ll buy you a coffee!

Questions? Want to chat? Here is a combined calendar to book a time.

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We're here to help you navigate through your biggest challenges and win in this highly competitive market. Anytime you want to talk, book a meeting.