I'm headed to Shoptalk in a few weeks, and I'll be honest: the last 60 days have made this year's event feel different from any I've attended before.

The pace of AI development has accelerated in ways that are hard to ignore. New model releases from Anthropic and OpenAI, agentic capabilities moving from demos to production, and a growing number of brands actually putting these tools to work inside real operations. The conversations at Shoptalk this year are going to reflect that shift.

What I'm Curious About

I'm less interested in the "AI is coming" narrative and more curious about what operators are actually doing with it. Specifically, how are brands wiring Claude, ChatGPT, or other models into inventory planning, purchasing, and replenishment? Where does it work, and where does it still need guardrails? Are brands building their own agents? 

For brands scaling across DTC, wholesale, retail, and marketplaces, the problems are not abstract. Multi-location inventory, constrained supply, channel allocation, landed costs, and margin visibility are daily realities. If AI belongs anywhere in operations, it has to earn its place inside those workflows.

What GoodDay Software Is Bringing

We will be on the floor at Shoptalk in the “Spark” startup zone, and one thing I am particularly excited to show is our MCP integration.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a way to connect large language models directly to a live operational dataset. In our case, that means combining the reasoning power of models like Claude with GoodDay's inventory, purchasing, and order data in real time. An operator can ask a natural language question and get an answer grounded in their actual numbers, not a generic output.

That is the direction we have been building toward with GoodAI Agentic Workflows: not AI layered on top of a reporting tool, but AI embedded in the operating core of the business. Scan sell-through trends, surface under-ordered SKUs, draft a purchase order, and flag only what needs human review. The goal is to give lean teams more capacity without removing them from decisions that matter.

Inventory remains the most complex and mission-critical part of a retail business. Any serious AI strategy in commerce has to start there.

Come Find Us at Shoptalk in Vegas

If you will be at Shoptalk Spring 2026 and you are thinking about how AI fits into your operational stack, I would enjoy comparing notes. We will be talking about how Shopify-native brands can unify their backend operations inside a system built specifically for them, and what it looks like when agentic workflows are connected to a real system of record.

The GoodDay Software team and I will be in the Sparks Startup Area, booth #SU37

It should be a good one. See you there.