The Dirty Martini Archives

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

The first half of 2026 has FLOWN by. The mad dash to maximize the value from NRF in Q1 was followed by the March-May crush of events, and “boom”, it’s June.

As we enter H2, Incisiv is working with our clients to adapt to the rapidly changing B2B marketing environment. AI is everywhere, but as we wrote in last month’s edition - creating connective tissue across these AI solutions is a big challenge. The word that is more important than any right now is: “Context”. Without it, your GTM will sound like everybody else's (already a huge problem before AI).

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

With the pace of change that is occurring in the industry right now and the efficiency that AI tools are able to provide, it would be natural to assume that retail and brand executives are quickly adapting and executing better.

The new Incisiv / World Retail Congress Retail Resilience & AI Adoption Study, produced in conjunction with Anaplan (298 supply chain + merchandise planning executives across North America and EMEA), highlights that the gap between insights and execution is far greater than expected. The most expensive operating cost in retail right now isn’t labor or freight; it’s decision latency. The report calls it the “Latency Tax”: the compounding cost of seeing a signal and reacting too late to capture the value.

Retailers have invested in visibility, analytics, and AI… yet the time from insight to execution is still taking too long. Only 10% of the respondents to the study fell into the Leader category, which means there is plenty of room for improvement.

Key findings (and what they really mean)

1. Only 5% of the overall industry has unified cross-functional incentives, versus 24% of Leaders (a 5x difference). In other words, most retailers can see the same dashboards, but they still answer to different scorecards, so action requires negotiation.

   The report’s blunt math: 95% of retailers still operate without unified incentives. When everyone can see the problem but no one owns the outcome, speed dies in meetings.

   Why it matters to B2B marketers: The dashboard view is not a differentiator anymore. What wins deals is helping retailers operationalize decisions across functions: shared KPIs, decision rights, and workflows that move from exception. Position your product as an operating model accelerator, not another analytics layer.

2. The planning cadence gap is the first layer of the “Latency Tax.”

   Two-thirds of the industry refreshes demand forecasts monthly or less (45% monthly, 22% quarterly). Leaders move on a different clock: 90% adjust forecasts weekly or faster (with 21% operating in real time).

   In a volatile market, a monthly cycle isn’t “suboptimal.” It’s structurally incapable of competing with a weekly operating model.

3. The report shows 69% of organizations rebalance inventory monthly or not at all once placed. And 78% adjust upstream supply quarterly or slower.

   This is where latency compounds: even if the forecast catches the signal, the physical response waits for the next scheduled window. By the time inventory moves, the “full price” window has already closed, and markdowns become the default correction mechanism.

   Why it matters to B2B marketers: This is where you tie your solution to recoverable value. The pain isn’t “forecast accuracy.” It’s execution latency. The best GTM angle is to quantify (even directionally) what faster rebalancing/supply adjustments prevent: markdowns, lost sales, and stranded inventory.

4. AI is viewed as “important” everywhere (importance averages 85%+). However, it’s currently being deployed where it’s easiest, not where speed matters most.

   In addition, deployment averages below 25%. This is a ~60-point gap between belief and reality.

   Leaders aren’t just deploying models; they are redesigning how decisions are being made. 76% of Leaders operate at system-recommended or autonomous decision levels, and 0% rely on fully manual processes.

   Why it matters to B2B marketers: “AI-powered” is table stakes now. The differentiator is decision architecture: embedded recommendations, approval workflows, guardrails, and closed-loop measurement. Marketers should lead with “decision velocity” outcomes because that’s where the budget will move when the AI hype settles into operational accountability.

Dive deeper into our cross-industry research and content.

Keeping in the vein of Supply Chain and Merchandising best practices, we partnered with Blue Yonder and Accenture to produce Modern Merchandising Operations in Action

Key takeaways include:

1) Merchandising ops is now a growth lever, not a back-office function.

• Boards are demanding faster launches, tighter margins, and real-time visibility—and the winners aren’t “trying harder,” they’re rebuilding the operational foundation that makes speed and precision repeatable. Operational excellence is increasingly what determines loyalty and share.

2) Disconnected data is quietly consuming the planning cycle (and the team’s best hours).

• When item, cost, pricing, planning, and finance live in different systems, teams spend their time reconciling instead of deciding. The piece calls out that merchants estimate ~one-third of the data they use is inaccurate or contains errors—which creates downstream execution failures (wrong allocations, pricing mismatches, stockouts that “shouldn’t” happen).

3) Manual workflows have become a competitive liability as retail’s pace outruns human coordination.

• Merchants are making too many daily decisions to manage manually across disconnected tools (item setup, costs, pricing, allocations, invoice reconciliation). The result is execution lag: promos that take days to deploy, launches that take weeks, and bottlenecks at every handoff.

4) The path to margin protection comes down to three foundational capabilities

• System of Record: single authoritative source for items/vendors/costs/pricing
• Process Excellence: structured, auditable workflows that remove ambiguity
• Margin Control: financial logic embedded into daily operational workflows with real-time cost capture

However, platform capability alone isn’t enough. Adoption + change management determines whether the retailer actually gets the outcomes.

Read the full Market Snapshot: Modern Merchandising Operations in Action

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.

This piece we ran last month, but this issue has come up several times with industry peers in the last few weeks - so we know it is highly topical and relevant. We know in a newsletter this length, not everything is read, so we’re going to run it again - highlighting its importance.

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.

Second Round - Incisiv on the Road…..

We are writing this newsletter while waiting for a connecting flight to Barcelona for Shoptalk Europe. 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 have over 60 retailers and brands registered for our June 10th dinner at Nobu Barcelona, in partnership with Manhattan Associates and Braze. It’s gonna be sick…

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

New York Community Dinner Series: Our next Dinner is June 18th in conjunction with CommerceIQ, and we are focusing the conversation on Redefining the Shopper Journey in an era of Agentic Commerce. We have a GREAT group of retailers and brands registered and are looking forward to the evening.

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