NVIDIA GTC 2026: Retail Sees Great Potential With Physical AI and Operational Improvements

During his presentation, McIntosh went into detail about how the souped-up Caper Carts that the company has deployed in over 100 grocery stores — with partners such as Kroger, Wegmans and ShopRite — are using AI to transform the grocery store experience into one that is frictionless, delightful and innovative for shoppers. 
 

“It’s a smart shopping cart, equipped with a digital screen, camera sensors, location sensors, and a weights and measures scale, and an NVIDIA Jetson board in every one of these smart shopping carts that we’re putting in our retailer stores,” he said.

The shopping cart, which is at the center of the store experience for most grocery store shoppers, is transformed from an inanimate, unresponsive object into a smart, connected and responsive tool that allows the retailer to engage with the shopper.

“The magic of the consumer experience is that customers are engaged for 30-plus minutes while shopping,” said McIntosh. “The majority of users log in with loyalty, so they get personalized deals, discounts on the screen, based on location, because of the location sensors.”

And while McIntosh believes in the physical store and in-store experience and competitive advantages for retailers, he’s not neglecting the digital side as the Caper Carts enable omnichannel experiences as well.

“We’re unifying the online and in-store experience with Caper. You can take the shopping list you’ve built online, or it will remind you before you check out to buy things that you forgot,” he said.
 

Shopify Uses AI to Give Small Retailers Scalable Personalization

As a platform for online retailers, Shopify is in the business of ensuring that other company’s shopping experiences are great. While they provide the building blocks needed to run an online store, Shopify is laser focused on using AI to boost conversions, transactions and product recommendations. The company is aiming to improve the experience for both merchants and shoppers alike — at scale — having served 2.2 trillion edge requests and 81 million consumers from Black Friday through Cyber Monday in 2025.

“Shopify merchants represent more than 12% of U.S. market share,” said Diego Ardila, senior staff machine learning engineer at Shopify, during his GTC session titled “Building Shopify’s Commerce Foundation Models.”

Product recommendations are one area where Shopify is using NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) kernels and AI inference to improve experiences for merchants and customers. Their AI recommendations, called Generative Recommendations (GR), are similar to other recommendations that are common to the online shopping experience, but Shopify believes that AI and context can make the suggestions more relevant.

“We can fine-tune the LLM to reason about the recommendations we are making,” said Ardila. “Instead of just recommending a product to a buyer, we can explain why that product might be interesting to them.”

While personalized shopping is the norm for large online retailers, it can often be expensive to deploy. But Shopify is using AI to bring personalized recommendations to small online retailers, which helps to level the playing field.