They Said Physical Retail Was Dying.We Gathered the People Proving Otherwise.

They said physical retail was dying. On May 14th, we gathered the people proving otherwise. The Retail Intelligence Summit brought retailers, analysts, technology providers and academics into one room at AIhub Lisbon

Where is retail going? What does the store of 2030 look like? How do we get there? A month later, the conversations are still resonating. Felipe Gonzalez and Toby Pickard — two people from very different corners of the industry — walked away with the same feeling: that something important happened in that room.

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And they're not the only ones.That's the thing about real transformation. It doesn't happen in a single boardroom, or inside one company's roadmap. It happens when people who rarely sit at the same table — retailers, technologists, researchers, innovators — show up, disagree, build on each other's ideas, and leave with a shared belief that the best of retail is still ahead of us.

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The Summit was honest conversations. Bold ideas. A room full of people willing to ask the hard questions out loud, instead of retreating to safe answers. This is also why Retail Intelligence Labs exists. RIL was born from the same belief that shaped the Summit: the future of retail doesn't belong to one company, one lab, or one boardroom. It belongs to all of us.

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At Sensei, we've always believed real transformation happens when pioneers from academia, technology and industry come together — decoding, disrupting, designing what comes next. The future of retail is not something that happens to us. It's something we build together.

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And we intend to keep being in the room where it happens — reinventing, reimagining, and researching what's next.

Thank you to everyone who made May 14th what it was.