AI was a featured topic at SPECS 2025.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a mainstream tool to support physical retailing operations.
At Chain Store Age’s recent 61th annual SPECS Show held in Grapevine, Texas, I moderated several conference sessions focused on some of the many different ways store and restaurant design, construction and facilities maintenance professionals are leveraging AI to streamline everyday workflows.
[READ MORE: NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show – AI is an everyday tool]
Drawing from those presentations, here are overviews of how AI can be used to enhance design and branding, maintenance, and facility monitoring efforts:
Design and branding
In the session “AI: The Future of Store Planning,” Paul Wolski, senior VP and creative director of design agency Miller Zell, said AI is a powerful design tool but reminded attendees that it does not replace the need for human participation in design.
“The physical store is one of the greatest manifestations of your brand,” said Wolski. “You know AI can swing wild. It can generate a tone of voice that can be technically right but just doesn’t sound right for your brand. It can also misinterpret things and make wild assumptions.”
Wolski told attendees they are the “subject matter experts” and need to perform a “gut check” on AI-generated design and branding content.
“Whatever AI is outputting, you have to kick the tires out of it to see if it is resonating,” said Wolski. “Is it the right vibe, the right voice? Does it resonate the way it needs to support your brand?”
Wolski also advised that AI should be merged into projects slowly with feedback from stakeholders, rather than simply forced in before all participants are ready.
“Determine your vision for AI; engage in an exercise that could help you demystify it and make it feel a little more approachable,” Wolski said.
Predictive maintenance
In a session entitled, “AI: The Future of Store Planning,” Paul Tidwell, president of digital for technology consulting firm Geniant LLC, explained how AI-enabled predictive maintenance of refrigeration and HVAC systems can provide retailers with significant cost savings.
“It’s not just about looking at the performance of the systems themselves, but how things like COVID or traffic is affecting them and then optimizing the schedules for how you’re cycling maintenance crews around different facilities with smart energy management,” said Tidwell.
Although the intense energy usage required to run AI systems is ironically putting upward pressure on power costs, Tidwell said AI can also offset that cost increase by allowing retailers to perform predictive maintenance.
“You can drive down maintenance and energy costs for your HVAC systems, and also achieve your sustainability and carbon footprint objectives as an organization,” said Tidwell.
He added AI-based predictive maintenance can also deliver indirect savings, such as fewer compliance issues and the ability to redeploy new capital against more urgent organizational business objectives than maintaining refrigeration and HVAC systems.
Sensor-based facility monitoring
Richard Jones, director of design and construction for Heartland Dental, discussed how retailers can monitor and get a better sense of their physical environments using AI in the session, “Collaborative Jobsite Monitoring: Elevating Performance Through Innovation.”
“This entire sector is a very competitive right now, and then the layering in of AI over the top of it is going to create a technological arms race,” said Jones. “The other thing that’s really interesting is the layering in of Internet of Things sensors, weather collection, site condition monitoring, asset tagging, all of these things are going to continue to be layered into facilities management software.”
In the near future, Jones said retailers will likely be able to execute facilities tickets based off notifications reported by IoT sensors.
https://chainstoreage.com/specs-2025-many-physical-retail-uses-ai