Iowa State held its third annual Retail Ready Summit on Thursday, with this year’s theme as “Leveraging AI: Working Smarter in Retail.” During this event, attendees heard from industry leaders from Abercrombie & Fitch and Scoreboard Group, as well as several local businesses, all centered around utilizing artificial intelligence for business success.
Each speaker shared their experience with business and presented attendees with useful knowledge in regards to AI that can be incorporated within the business. The last presentation of the event, “AI: Small Retail, Big Impact,” featured multiple people from local small businesses.
The event took place from 12 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the fourth floor of the Student Innovation Center. The event hosted multiple speakers from many different businesses and industries. Each presentation had a different topic, and are listed below:
12:30 p.m. – Keynote Presentation, Abercrombie & Fitch
- Tyler Valladolid, Senior Director of Merchandising
- Tyler Parker, Senior Designer
1:45 p.m. – Making AI Less Artificial for Your Business & Customers
- Josh Streets, CEO of Scoreboard Group
3 p.m. – AI: Small Retail, Big Impact
- Patrick Bergstrom, co-owner/COO Eliot Pointe LLC: Cooks’ Emporium, Nook & Nest, ZW Mercantile, the Recipe
- Bethany DeVries, owner Crucoli LLC: Della Viti
- Eric Abrams, co-owner A&R Enterprises LLC: The Loft, Duck Worth Wearing
The Retail Ready Summit was orchestrated by a research group, funded by a university and a national grant. The focus of this group is to conduct research on rural development within Iowa businesses. For three years now, they have hosted the event to ensure that the content is useful and relevant to Iowa State students.
Zoe Schumm, a doctorate candidate in the apparel, events and hospitality management department, is part of the research group and provided insight into the importance of the event and why AI was picked as this year’s topic.
“The group felt that with this use of AI, and just the explosion of AI on the retail scene, we needed to have experts in to talk not only to our students but also to how small businesses can use AI,” Schumm said. “I think there’s a lot of use cases and how large enterprises use AI or could use AI, but very few small businesses can.”
She also spoke about why the specific panel speakers were chosen.
“I put together the panel of speakers that can speak to the large about how it can be integrated with enlargement and now our third session is looking specifically at how small businesses here in Iowa are already using AI within their operations and retail,” Schumm said.
