8 Retail Technology Trends That Stood Out at NRF 2026

NRF 2026 drew roughly 40,000 to 50,000 attendees to New York over three days. Brett Cooper and Lee DeHihns from BlueFletch walked the show floor and talked with retailers and vendors. Came back with four takeaways each. What they saw captures the biggest retail technology trends from NRF 2026, what retail IT directors and store ops leaders are actually evaluating right now- not the marketing decks from the booth, but the conversations happening behind them. The Frontline Mobility Edge broke down all eight on the podcast.

Watch the full episode for the complete discussion.

What Technology Trends Dominated the NRF 2026 Show Floor?

Four technologies were present in nearly every aisle of the Javits Center. Three of them are reaching a maturity point that makes them viable for mid-market retailers, not just enterprise pilots.

Kiosks are everywhere, but the quality of implementation varies. Lee DeHihns called it a hot take: kiosks were ubiquitous on the show floor, covering everything from self-checkout to AI-powered auto parts lookup. The value is clear for discrete use cases (product search in hardware stores, flooring departments where high-margin items need associate engagement). The risk is poor UX. “My frustration is around poor implementations,” DeHihns said. Voice-activated kiosks in noisy environments, abandoned sessions with no clear step count. Self-checkouts bottlenecked behind a single associate managing eight stations all erode the customer experience kiosks are supposed to improve.

Electronic shelf labels are finally reaching critical mass. ESLs have been “coming for a long time,” DeHihns said, noting he first discussed them with a grocer in 2015. The business case has tipped: retailers with two or three thousand stores but only one or two associates on the floor at any given time cannot manually reprice fast enough. ESLs enable centralized real-time pricing changes, competitive price matching, and rapid promotional updates. The risk is data quality. “Any mistake you make is going to be instantly reflected on the shelf and available for purchase at the wrong price,” DeHihns warned. Clean planogram data and tight system integration are prerequisites.

Key Considerations

Camera and sensor technology is getting good enough to deploy. Cooper highlighted the narrowing of the price-and-capability gap in edge AI cameras. Amazon’s Just Walk Out demo store at NRF this year used noticeably fewer cameras than previous years while still enabling grab-and-go checkout. Cameras with built-in AI coprocessors now handle shelf monitoring (stockout detection), loss prevention, and customer dwell-time analysis. Queue management without sending data to the cloud. Cooper’s advice for where to start: think about it like RFID tag decisions. If a customer is dwelling in a high-margin department (flooring, auto parts, electronics), a camera can flag that dwell time and notify the nearest associate. Privacy regulations and false positive rates remain the two concerns to evaluate.

Display technology is more than a gimmick now. The “hologram aisle” in the lower level of the convention center showcased 3D product displays, interactive holograms, and large-format digital signage. Cooper’s filter: match the display investment to the product’s margin. A holographic display for a $300 pair of shoes makes more sense than one for a low-margin commodity. And do not deploy without measuring something. Conversion rate, basket size, and dwell time are the metrics that justify the spend.

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How Are Tariffs Changing Retail Technology Buying Decisions?

Tariffs were the first takeaway Cooper raised and the last action item both hosts circled back to. The shift from 2025’s “wait and see” posture to 2026’s “plan for three years of volatility” was the clearest signal from NRF conversations.

Retailers are no longer waiting. Cooper talked to global companies selling into North America that found sourcing costs unpredictable quarter over quarter. Retailers that had paused mobile hardware purchases through 2025 are now building tariff protection into vendor contracts and planning for cost variability as a permanent condition rather than a temporary disruption.

Lower-cost mobile devices are more capable than expected. Cooper noted that device vendors from Korea, China, and other markets showed hardware that is significantly more capable than the “cheap imports” label historically implied. Even Zebra leadership acknowledged the trend: more companies want mobile devices in the hands of more employees, and not every worker needs a high-end scanner imager. The caveat is knowing where to invest: a warehouse scanner that needs to read barcodes at 10 feet still requires premium optics. A device that will be dropped on concrete needs an IP rating to match. The lifecycle question matters too. A two-year device can afford a lighter support contract. An eight-year device (Cooper has seen them in warehouses) cannot.

Where Should Retail IT Leaders Start With New Technology in 2026?

The episode closed with a practical framework for any retail IT director or store ops leader trying to prioritize after walking NRF.

AI for cost control, not just innovation theater. DeHihns’ fourth takeaway was the most concrete: approach AI with a cost-savings end goal. Labor forecasting based on historical store traffic data. Inventory accuracy to reduce both overstock and stockouts. Shrink reduction. Returns analysis to understand why certain products consistently come back. Cooper added context from a keynote he attended: “AI is not gonna replace people.” A merchandiser who spends an hour building a store ordering plan can reduce that to four minutes with AI, then use the remaining time to investigate edge cases, such as why a specific product is returned at twice the normal rate.

Audit friction points on both sides of the counter. Customer friction (checkout speed, product findability, loyalty engagement) and employee friction (last-minute schedule changes, safety incidents, device frustrations) are where technology investments pay back fastest.

Pilot small, on an isolated network if needed. Cooper recommended companies like Cradlepoint. This lets you set up a 5G or LTE network independent of your store’s production network. Test a camera system, an ESL deployment, or a new mobile device for a discrete use case in one store with four people. “A pilot shouldn’t be moving a battleship,” Cooper said. Disproving a theory is still a useful outcome.

Build a tariff-driven three-year plan. The closing advice: assume that tariff pressure and macroeconomic volatility will persist over the next three years. Retailers who sat on the sidelines in 2025 risk falling behind competitors who invested strategically during the same period. “If you do nothing and the other guy is actually doing something and being strategic about it, you’re gonna get left behind,” Cooper said.

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