- Three learnings every retailer should take away
- AI is reshaping how customers find you, before they ever reach your team.
- Automation works best when it’s intentional, not total.
- The post-purchase experience is where brands are won and lost.
- The conversation that kept coming back: AI in the voice channel
- How Aircall fits in
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Get free access- Three learnings every retailer should take away
- AI is reshaping how customers find you, before they ever reach your team.
- Automation works best when it’s intentional, not total.
- The post-purchase experience is where brands are won and lost.
- The conversation that kept coming back: AI in the voice channel
- How Aircall fits in
Ready to build better conversations?
Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.
Get free accessRetail Fest brought together some of Australia's sharpest retail minds on the Gold Coast. Across three days of keynotes, panels, and workshops, a few themes emerged that every retailer should be paying attention to. Here are the ones that stuck with us.
Three learnings every retailer should take away
AI is reshaping how customers find you, before they ever reach your team.
Multiple sessions tackled the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery. Tools like ChatGPT are now part of how customers research products, compare options, and shortlist brands. Being visible in AI search is one thing. Being recommended is another. For retailers, this means the customer journey now begins in a channel most businesses are not yet optimising for, and the gap between early movers and the rest is widening fast.
Automation works best when it’s intentional, not total.
One of the clearest messages across the event was that AI is most powerful when it's designed, not just deployed. Sessions on growth, team building, and operations all pointed to the same insight: the retailers pulling ahead aren't automating everything. They're being deliberate about where technology handles the load and where people show up. As one founder session put it plainly, AI matters, but human depth is what lasts.
The post-purchase experience is where brands are won and lost.
Returns, delivery communication, and follow-up were recurring pain points across multiple panels. Customers hold brands to a higher standard after checkout than before it. The businesses standing out are shifting from reactive customer service to proactive operations, catching problems before customers have to raise them. Less firefighting. Stronger retention. And critically, less pressure on already stretched teams.
The conversation that kept coming back: AI in the voice channel
Woven through many of these discussions was something we hadn’t expected to be quite so prominent: the phone.
Even as digital touchpoints multiply, voice remains one of the highest-intent moments in the customer journey. When someone calls, they need something resolved. A session on communication design highlighted how businesses are rethinking voice interactions end-to-end, using call tracking, analytics, and system integrations to reduce friction and improve experience across the full conversation, not just the moment of contact.
The question retailers were asking wasn’t whether voice matters; they were asking how to make it work better, at scale, without adding headcount. That’s the question Aircall is built to answer.
How Aircall fits in
Aircall puts AI and your team on one system. AI Agents handle the volume. AI Assistants support your reps in the moments only humans win. When AI hands a conversation to your team, the customer never notices. The rep steps in with full context already on screen, and the customer never has to repeat themselves.
On the inbound side, AI Agents handle the routine, high-volume calls that consume your team's time: order status, returns, delivery queries, FAQs. Available 24/7, responding instantly, collecting caller details, and escalating cleanly when a situation needs a human touch, with everything already captured so nothing is lost.
On the outbound side, AI Agents act the moment intent and urgency are highest. Every lead follow-up, every appointment reminder, every post-purchase check-in, handled automatically at unlimited scale. Teams using Aircall AI are seeing 87% of calls resolved without escalation to a human agent (TripCity), and 90% of after-hours calls resolved autonomously (SJWD Water District). Your team steps into conversations that are already progressed and ready to convert.
This maps directly to the three-mode framework that resonated strongly at Retail Fest:
AI-led. Routine, repeatable, high-volume interactions handled end to end by AI Agents. Order tracking, returns initiation, reminders, FAQs. Fast, consistent, and available around the clock.
AI-assisted. Your team leads, with AI Assistants supporting in real time. Live transcription, smart prompts, post-call summaries, and automated CRM updates so reps perform at their best on every conversation.
Team-led. Human judgement is essential. AI steps back. These are the conversations that build loyalty, handle complexity, or require the kind of empathy no automation should attempt.
Because AI Agents and AI Assistants run on the same platform, every conversation makes the next one better. The handover between them is invisible to the customer. And one dashboard across every AI-led and team-led interaction gives you visibility into what's working, and where to improve.
If you're ready to rethink how your team handles customer conversations, we'd love to show you what this looks like in practice.
Published on May 18, 2026.
