“Unlike the metaverse, this feels orders of magnitude more real.”
Steve Dennis
President and Founder, SageBerry Consulting
Co-Host, “Remarkable Retail” Podcast
… on agentic AI’s growing impact on retail, via his annual predictions on Substack.
Retail strategist Steve Dennis has been making annual retail predictions since 2018, and by his own reckoning, he’s been “pretty, pretty, pretty good” at it.
This year’s baker’s dozen comes with a caveat: “Uncertainty Reigns Supreme” tops his list. Between shifting trade policy and an economy facing multiple headwinds, Dennis writes that predicting the future has never been harder.
But on artificial intelligence, he’s willing to make a call, with a hedge. Failed experiments are inevitable, he writes, and “we may well find ourselves teetering on the edge of the trough of disillusionment soon enough.”
But unlike the metaverse (“ha!”), Dennis sees something fundamentally different this time. If 2023 was all metaverse, 2024 retail media networks, and 2025 generative AI, he says 2026 is shaping up to be “all things Agentic.” The pace of AI introductions, collaborations, and consumer adoption is “breathtaking,” he notes, with venture capital flooding into what seems like hundreds of startups.
Dennis, who has consulted with retail brands worldwide, authored two books, and speaks at industry conferences globally, also made some calls closer to home.
On the merged Neiman Marcus and Saks (now Saks Global), Dennis has some insight. The strategist is a former executive at Neiman Marcus. He predicts both brands will emerge from bankruptcy “leaner, meaner, but still fragile,” with most overlapping locations and smaller-market stores shuttered and a revenue base likely “at least 30-40% smaller.”
One open question, he writes: whether cash flow will be “sufficient to stay at the leading edge of technology and address the need to modernize and down-size many of the remaining locations.” His verdict? “Worse case, they may live to die another day. Best case, things are likely to remain fragile.”
He also calls big retail turnarounds a “mixed bag” and handicaps a few of them thusly: Gap and Nike (the good); Kohl’s and JC Penney (the bad); Macy’s and Target (the meh, “if they’re lucky”). And he expects Sephora to “take steps to reduce their exposure to Kohl’s this year” as the department store chain continues to falter.
Physical stores, meanwhile, “matter more, but also less,” Dennis writes. For the right retailers, brick-and-mortar has never been more important. But “if all a physical location does is deliver average stuff for average people,” he warns, “they lack a fundamental reason for being.”
That’s not all. Dennis also predicts luxury’s future “will not be evenly distributed,” Starbucks will reverse course on its pick-up-only cafes, job worries will replace inflation as the consumer concern du jour, and the resale market is “finally ready for its close-up.” Oh, and retailers will double down on wellness—with longevity becoming “a far bigger marketing message.”
But his bottom line: “The collapse of the unremarkable middle will continue unabated.”
Read Dennis’s full 2026 predictions here. He also unpacks them on the latest episode of his “Remarkable Retail” podcast.
For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.
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