For merchandising, high tech needs high touch.
I like to reference John Naisbitt and his 1982 book, Megatrends. He wrote that every time a new technology enters society, there must be a compensatory investment in the human touch. Without that counterweight, the technology ends up being rejected.
No wonder self-checkouts work best with store associates alongside the technology. You can see the unexpectedly popular LinkedIn post on the topic, as seen in Costco.
But I’ll argue that merchandising is an even better example of where high tech and high touch must be balanced.
Because of, not surprisingly, AI.
The prevailing mood amongst the likes of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain is that the impact of AI on merchandising is about freeing up the merchant’s time.
In fact, merchants can possibly get up to 40% of their time back.
How so? AI agents can build the line plan, fine-tune the assortment, and simulate pricing outcomes. Demand planning tools can flag trends and allocate to the right stores. Technology can eliminate repetitive spreadsheet work and reporting.
I’ll buy into that, especially because there was a time in my career when I spent far too much time in front of a computer, living in Excel, floating in a self-imposed pivot table purgatory.
So if I escape said purgatory and free up that time, how should it be spent?
The Shop Floor = The Human Touch
The compensatory investment here is getting out into the market, spending time on the shop floor, and talking to customers.
Watching a customer react to your assortment in real time, good or bad, is something no AI agent will ever hand you.
Consider this. Christopher Nolan does not use email. When he casts a film he delivers the script by hand and waits while the actor reads it. He flew to Ireland and sat there while Cillian Murphy read Oppenheimer in a hotel room. Part of that is secrecy. Part of it is that Nolan wants to see the reaction face to face.
The merchant version is a customer picking up your pant, holding it against herself, and putting it back.
Not as dramatic as The Odyssey but crucial information, nonetheless.
That is the compensatory investment.
For the retailer it shows up as more full price selling, fewer markdowns, and less excess inventory.
Consider Abercrombie & Fitch as an example. Fourteen consecutive quarters of net sales growth as of Q1 fiscal 2026. Category mix and brand repositioning are part of that story, but so is this.
The high tech: a chase model that only works because the supply chain can move. Horowitz has described the sourcing team as agile enough to work with the merchant teams every week, read the business, and chase into what is working. Lean inventory, fewer promotions, better AUR. They completed a merchandising ERP upgrade this year and are testing AI tools on top of it.
The high touch: Horowitz, a merchant herself, sends her teams to Friday night football games to watch the Hollister kids, and on three and four day weekend trips living alongside the Abercrombie customer.
Here is what that buys you. At NRF this year Horowitz told the story of denim. Customers liked the jeans but wanted zippers instead of button flies. The company listened, made the change, and denim sales took off.
That is the high tech and high touch balance in action.
“Manual” Merchants Will Win
The secret to my success as a merchant was not complicated. It was store visits every week. Talking to customers, watching their reactions, working alongside my store associates.
Every investment I made in the human touch contributed to that success. And with more data sources and more technology available to merchants today, the human touch is needed more than ever.
So if AI really does unlock 40% of a merchant’s time, the question is where that time goes.
Here is where I would put it:
1 – A full day in a store selling (yes, selling), styling, and coaching associates on outfitting the customer.
2 – Weekly calls with store managers to get feedback in season.
3 – Asking customers in store why they are not buying a particular item.
4 – Comp shopping in the market to make sure I am not under or over assorted.
Naisbitt’s idea was simple. Without a “human-touch” counterweight, technology gets rejected.
For merchandising, the counterweight is the store visits, selling, asking why and so forth.
These are the tasks that balance investments in technology and drive merchandising excellence.
