From Livestreaming to Virtual Sellers: Retail’s Wild New Frontier Revealed at NRF 2025: Retail's Big Show APAC

Welcome to Reach Holistic, the official podcast of Corsight Research for June 3rd, 2025. This week, our globetrotting CEO, Deborah Weinswig, is in Singapore for NRF's The Big Show, Asia Pacific. After 35 hours on a plane and a brief nap... Debra is with us to share three important themes global retailers will be discussing over the next few days to prepare for the back half of 2025.

So we are just getting ready for NRF APAC, which is being hosted this year in Singapore. And it is a multi-day event across the region. I'm obviously here, so it does extend to the West as well. And I would say that several of the topics that have already come to fruition are certainly around Gen.ai, this idea around platforms versus brands versus retail, which I think is quite interesting.

And then I think lastly, just around the creative. So if we take a big, giant step back on the AI side, one of the things that was most interesting already is this idea around multi-agents. And so if you have agents working with other agents, either at your company or if you're trying to look at new ways to think about fulfillment or production, right, can you have the agents figure it out and then surface?

even kind of a whole workflow process to you, which would truly be amazing. And this, I think, is a fairly young idea that's getting some legs. And do you think that the whole human in the loop is important? But I do think that it was the first time I've really heard uttered concern over what would our roles be. And I think it all goes back. We've talked about this many times, right?

With the prior industrial revolution, etc., we have seen changes in what the workday looks like, where we can do our work.

what tools and resources we need. So the feeling is right now this is probably the same way, but I would say that even those in the innovation space are starting to express some concern. Secondly, as we really start to think about this idea of the transaction and we look at stores, we look at and stores actually come up a lot. Many folks who are brands have said that they've opened more stores than they've ever expected in 24, and that's continuing to 25.

I would say that we believe we're seeing something similar across the world. But if you think about it, this part of the world used to be O2O, online to offline, right? So D2C first. We're really seeing a lot of those G2C brands now lean even heavier into stores. And this idea around clienteling, the relationship between the consumer and the brand and the retailer and how that's evolving.

I think is really kind of quite interesting. And then as we start to think about some of the larger platforms, I'm feeling quite fortunate tomorrow. I've got Jeremy Ng from Bike Dance on the global side on stage with me. And we're talking about how transactions are taking place, where they're taking place, what's the most efficient for the consumer, what drives the lowest rate of returns. And I do think that...

These questions and these opportunities are still very new. And we just did this really interesting report with Alibaba and in conjunction with Peking University around brands and what brands do Chinese consumers want. I always think about brand discovery and legacy brands. And what we found there was that about a third of brands on Chinese platforms and those where there's a lot of interest continue to be these Western brands and what really differentiates.

them, I think is marketing, which is the third point I really want to kind of touch on here, but also whether it's celebrities or live streaming or whatnot, how do you go to market and how do you ultimately tell the brand story? And I think this idea around storytelling is still very Western.

And I do think it's made it more difficult in some cases for some of the luxury brands where we just haven't seen a lot of storytelling. I actually have always thought that it was a huge opportunity and have told many of our clients that. But it's just not as much of what we see in this part of the world. And so this opportunity taken of some of what we've learned in the East and in the West.

whether it's storytelling from the West combined with amazing these KOLs or key opinion leaders who do a lot of this live streaming. And that topic has also come up quite a bit as well. So we're seeing the second bucket between where does the transaction begin and where does the transaction end? In the West, we see live streaming is really more for discovery versus transaction. And I will say a lot of people here, and I mean, almost every conversation, QVC came up.

And it was this idea of we have this amazing platform. Why didn't they just digitize it in a different way?

you know, they now have this partnership or whatever with TikTok, but I think in their own right, I mean, they really do understand how to sell a product and how to drive interest in demand. And I think that in the West, have creators and influencers and right that is different than a key opinion leader that is different than somebody who you would buy from because they've done their research they know the product etc and they actually use the product and wear the product whereas you know

and what we've seen some of the challenges have been influencers and creators, right? They're getting paid in a way that breaks down trust. And doesn't necessarily lead to the same outcomes that we've seen with live streaming in the East. And so this idea about where do things begin and end. Potentially, as we move to a multi-agent world, we'll see a change in terms of where it could even impact fulfillment and also cost of fulfillment and what last mile looks like.

So this idea that we're living in a world where the beginning and end of a transaction continue to change, the clientele aspect is even more important.

I think is really interesting. And then one other thing, and so I want to talk about like this third bucket around creative. So one of the things that has already come up is this idea about how do you monetize eyeballs? And so... Someone was using the anecdote today of you can get free fast charging in China if you just put your phone in the charger and you have to watch a few ads. And I'm like, that's so smart, right? That's like.

next-gen, next-gen, next-gen retail media. And so this idea that, okay, I want this. Hey, I want a new car. Okay, you have to sit down and watch, you know, 400 hours of ads. No problem. And so I think that we're still much, much earlier on this idea in the West. this idea of a rewarding culture. And I think it goes back to very early days, really early days of live streaming where you were, as a streamer, I was doing this in China.

Oh my gosh, a decade plus ago. And people would send you like flowers and trees and all this stuff. And they all had like a dollar value. It wasn't actual cash, right? It was more of this kind of thing that stood for cash. But this idea that... you were being rewarded as the live streamer. And I used to read research reports and stuff like that. I mean, I wasn't selling anything, but it was like people rewarding you for sharing your knowledge and sharing your intelligence.

And I think that this is really important when we look at the idea around retail media, which came up in, I'd say, two-thirds of my conversations. And this is just the preamble to the conference. I can't wait until the end. But this idea... that the consumer is being rewarded for behavior and what is it that they need for incentive. It's not that much if it's just like a quick charge on your phone.

One of the things I've always, you know, encouraged a lot of Western brands to think about is how you sell and where you sell. And I remember one of the brands was just shocked that, you know, you could put product or information like even in the women's bathroom.

And that was like a selling opportunity. So I think truly everything is a selling opportunity. And so don't overlook what might seem to be so simple, right? You're waiting in the right line for the restroom, right? Could you have a AR experience where you can do virtual try-on? product. And if you like the product, then you can buy it. These are some, I think, very interesting ways to approach. And so we really lean into creative now.

This idea that you can have an agent create your copy, create your background, your streamer, your influencer, your creator, they're virtual. So the background's virtual, the person selling is virtual. And the product is real or could not be real, right? You could use it as an opportunity to test next generation product. And so... I think this started in the evening, like this whole topic around the marketing, the content.

And then sort of think a little bit more about marketing and could you use your agents to not only create all of that from a live stream perspective, but then could you have your agents also... frame it for the right medium as well. So the difference between Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, if you want to use QVC. I mean, I don't think QVC has not gone virtual influencer yet, but we may, I mean, hey.

Think about how much money they probably pay these influencers right now. Think about like an Isaac Mizrahi, et cetera. And what would that look like if you're using virtual sellers? We're in the middle of like 6-6 shopping festival and it's amazing, right? Like I go to take a Grab, right, which is like a Uber or Lyft and like there's tons of advertisements. I'm not saving any money, although maybe the operating costs are less than I am, but it's unbelievable.

how that changes the whole experience. And I guess I feel like I'm learning something as a result and learning kind of like what products are the top products and what people are interested in and showing kind of like what's selling right now. And so maybe it doesn't.

feel right. The difference is I don't feel like I'm being put upon in terms of advertisement. I feel like I'm being educated. And that topic also came up quite a bit tonight around how are people learning about ChatGPT and how are they staying on top of it?

You know, one guy, if I consider to be very far forward, was saying he, like, even read, like, a book about it. He's like, who would have thought that I'd be reading a book on, you know, kind of chat GPT prompts. But he said it was amazing. He said it's, like, really had an influence, some of the prompting that he's done. And I would say a lot of folks would...

talk to, their engineers all use Copilot. You were starting to hear a little bit about how DeepSeek is being utilized in some trading environments to help them look for aberrations or things. about leading indicators for different stocks. And so having different crawlers for information and then kind of bring that back.

Of course, we're talking about retail here, but this is all about consumer-facing industries. And so if we start to think about how information is aggregated, how to understand what the consumer wants in that moment. Right. We've had all this with micro trends. So we can start to use these crawlers to look globally. These days, a lot of fashion trends, depending on what retailer you talk to, a lot are coming out of Japan. Korea's second in many people's opinions.

Let's just call it the east. And so if you could use these crawlers, though, to better understand maybe product direction, then you could make more of the right product. And as we always say, right, the real great unlock is right product, right price, right time. I also want to say right fit. I think fit has come up more and more recently as well. And so is there a way to utilize some of these technologies to improve fit?

but also to improve the consumer's purchasing journey and that they know that this product will fit them when they buy it. So stay tuned. There's definitely more. And I would say that some of the top questions on my mind as we go into the next few days are how and who owns AI in these organizations? How do different consumers consume and what are the differences geographically? I think that's also a question on many people's minds right now is where and when.

and just what things look like on a global basis, like what's similar and what's different. And so where can we save time by looking at some of this intelligence, right, which is, of course, a lot of what we do at Coresight. Where can we think differently about what's happening and what's next? Some of the things that we're also looking at while we're here is how do you change kind of organizational mindset? How important is executive support?

How do you look at mindset training and some of these things around really changing how the consumer thinks? and to help encourage them to make better decisions and do more research to figure out what is the color, what is the fit, what is the fabric, so that we really decrease returns.

And I personally think that that's a huge opportunity here. And it's certainly one that I would like to see us lean into a bit more because I think that there's a lot of instances where people still order at small, medium and large. Hopefully they keep the one that fits if they like the product at all. And I'll say some of the other questions that I've had kind of leading today is platforms are driving discovery and commerce enablers are driving conversion.

Where does long-term customer value sit, but who owns customer retention, but also who owns the data? I think that this idea around legacy, right, whether it's, we don't need to use names, but I said these legacy systems, and then you go into like a Databricks and this idea around thinking differently about data and... this movement to more fluidity and how can you leverage all this unstructured data to come up with answers, kind of right time, right place.

And so I think that that's also been really interesting because we've seen some of the different... large technology providers approaching things in different ways. I personally think it's been really interesting, but the ability to do these things quickly and inexpensively is, I think, really critical. And it was interesting last week around the lead, we hosted a...

roundtable of Israeli tech startups and had one of our interns there who was actually quite interesting. And we asked the startups, What platform they were sitting on out of the 10, nine were sitting on AWS, which I also, they were saying like, they're just able to move much quicker.

much less expensively. There's a lot more responsiveness in terms of questions that they had. And so I think that as we move into the back half of 25, and I know we covered a lot of ground here, but once again, Gen AI, that was the first bucket.

Second bucket being consumer journey. So where does the consumer start? Is unified commerce? Where does live streaming come into play? Where do the stores come into play? And then third is around content creation or marketing. Let's call it the creative side of things. So those are the three things that we're looking at today. And I know we covered even between the cushions, but there is a lot that's changing at a rapid pace.

And I think having the opportunity to either work with your technology providers or technology solutions to see what's possible, that to me is real change. You don't necessarily need the same level of technical talent. So it can be cheaper, it can be faster than it has in the past, I think is, to me, one thing that's really changing the game when it comes to retail. And if anything, I see that speeding up.

About a year and a half ago, we started to see more graduates than we ever had from top schools going to work at Walmart, which I think was a smart thing to do considering some of the layoffs we've seen. But this idea that they wanted to go somewhere where it was physical, they could see what was happening, right? It was just a real change. And since then, look at some of the successes of some of these retailers. I mean, it's truly been amazing.

And with the continued consolidation, so if we think about exporting goods in Foot Locker, and we're seeing things being built out in a major way, I think we're going to see a lot of change. But I think that... Going forward, we'll see brands willing to help other brands because there is a competitive mode set up. And at this point, it's really just a matter of thinking about how to look at things in a different way.

but in a retail kind of way. And that really is about clienteling and putting the customer first. So I'm going to sign off. There's going to be a lot more coming out of NRF and looking forward to getting back to you on all of that. Take care and have a great day. Thanks, Debra. And thank you for joining us this week on Retailistic. As Debra mentioned, big changes are on the horizon and we're here to help you keep up. Visit us at coresite.com to sign up for our free daily update.

and to learn more about all the ways Corsight Research supports the retail industry. Have a wonderful day, and we'll see you next week.