The Augmented Associate: Why AI-Ready Retailers Are Hiring More

About this episode

The episode discusses how AI is augmenting retail jobs rather than replacing them, featuring insights from Greg Buzek of IHL Group.

S2E8 Greg Buzek of IHL Group on the AI Hiring Gap the Retail Industry Got Backwards For two years, every conference stage and every headline has told you the same thing. AI is coming for retail jobs. The robots are taking over. Store headcount is doomed. The data tells a completely different story , and it is not close. In part two of our three-part AI in Retail series, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit back down with Greg Buzek , President and Chief AI Orchestrator at IHL Group , to take apart the doom narrative with hard numbers from IHL’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study. The retailers deploying the most AI in their stores are adding store associates at nearly double the rate of everyone else. Edge-current retailers plan to grow store headcount at 70% versus 36% for their peers. The fastest-growing retailers are 115% more likely to be adding people, not cutting them. This is the augmented associate model, and it’s the through-line of the whole episode. The winning retailers treat AI as a tool to augment store associates rather than replace them. Greg traces it all the way back to self-checkout 25 years ago, when Kroger trained its best people to teach customers and then…

People in this episode

Host: Ricardo Belmar

Guest: Greg Buzek

Topics covered

• AI in retail
• hiring trends
• augmented associates
• retail transformation
• self-checkout history

Keywords

• AI hiring gap
• retail jobs
• store associates
• retail transformation study
• augmented associate model

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IHL Group, Kroger, Kmart

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