S5E14 2025 Retail Year in Review - AI, Consumer Shifts, and the Future of Commerce with Guest Host, Alicia Esposito!

In this Season 5 finale of The Retail Razor Show, guest host Alicia Esposito (Future Commerce) sits down with Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden for a deep, unfiltered 2025 retail year in review. Together, they unpack the biggest trends shaping the industry, from AI’s accelerating influence, to the emotional needs of today’s consumer, the rise of resale, the evolution of marketplaces, and the shifting definition of value.

Across the Retail Razor Podcast Network - The Retail Razor Show, Blade to Greatness, Data Blades, and Retail Transformers - this year’s guests revealed a powerful through‑line: retail is no longer just about convenience or price. It’s about culture, community, emotion, and the human experience.

This episode explores:

How AI is reshaping leadership, decision‑making, and personalization
Why consumers—especially Gen Z—are craving analog joy and emotional shopping
The rise of marketplaces like Temu and AliExpress
Retail media’s evolution and the coming disruption from agentic commerce
The loyalty shakeout and why brand equity matters more than ever
The explosive growth of resale and secondhand shopping
Holiday shopping behavior and the psychology behind “perpetual shopping lists”
The keywords that will define 2026: velocity and joy

If you want to understand where retail is heading in 2026, this is the episode you can’t miss!

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About our Guest Host

Alicia Esposito, Director, Content + Media Strategy - Future Commerce

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciaesposito/

Alicia is the head of content and insights for Future Commerce. At Future Commerce we are big on dissecting the intersection of culture and commerce and not just covering what's happening today, but also what are the ripple effects for tomorrow, and for the future. Future Commerce delivers consumer insights for e-commerce and retail brands. Newsletters, essays, podcasts, and research. For the risk-takers in Commerce! Future Commerce helps brands manifest vision and create goals which lead to future-altering impacts for their customers, and for the world around them.

Chapters:

00:00 Preview

01:06 Introduction and Host Introduction

03:02 Balancing Automation and Human Intuition

06:57 Consumer Behavior and AI

10:18 The Evolution of Retail Experiences

18:21 The Importance of Brand Value

24:14 Challenges in Fast Fashion and Marketplaces

28:23 The Future of Commerce

31:36 Retail Media Evolution

36:50 Consumer Behavior and Shopping Trends

41:09 The Impact of Resale and Sustainability

50:12 Personalization and AI in Retail

53:16 The Keyword That Will Represent 2026

55:45 Show Close

Meet your hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voices for 2025 & a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2025. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Retail, & AGI Thought Leader, a Top 50 Management, Transformation, & Careers Thought Leader, a Top 100 Digital Transformation & Agentic AI Thought Leader, plus a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the director partner marketing for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is CEO of Luxlock, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2025, and a Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Currently, Casey is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T.

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.