NEW YORK—Dataiku, the Universal AI Platform provider, made waves at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show, showcasing how generative AI is propelling retailers beyond pilots into production-scale deployments. With Jed Dougherty, Head of AI Architecture, leading the charge on stage and in interviews, the company emphasized connected decision-making across merchandising, supply chain, and marketing, complete with guardrails for trust and accountability.

At booth 19406, Dataiku demonstrated its platform’s agnostic design, integrating with all clouds, data platforms, AI services, and legacy systems to future-proof AI initiatives. Built-in governance and no-, low-, and full-code capabilities enable retailers to build differentiated AI driving measurable business value, as detailed on the NRF Big Show exhibitor page.

Dougherty’s session, ‘AI: Retail’s Ultimate Influencer,’ explored winning patterns for scaling AI, positioning it as the industry’s steering force rather than mere support. ‘AI isn’t just supporting retail anymore, it’s steering it,’ the session description states, highlighting agentic and predictive intelligence amplifying human expertise.

From Pilots to Production Powerhouse

Dataiku’s presence underscored enterprise adoption trends, where retailers align business vision, data, and systems for real impact. The platform’s LLM Mesh and Dataiku Answers deliver secure, high-quality conversational GenAI use cases in days, not months, accelerating time-to-market for chatbots via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) from trusted sources, per the company’s product page.

In retail-specific applications, Dataiku powers demand forecasting using transaction datasets, product metadata, and seasonal data, allowing non-data scientists to generate ML models swiftly. Prepackaged use cases in its retail accelerator pack speed AI efforts across personalization, inventory optimization, and customer insights, as outlined in the Dataiku blog.

Enterprise governance remains central, with IDC naming Dataiku a Leader in the Worldwide Unified AI Governance Platforms 2026 report for end-to-end life-cycle controls spanning DataOps, MLOps, and LLMOps. ‘AI governance is no longer about policies and oversight alone—it has become an operational requirement embedded in how AI is built and deployed,’ said David Schubmehl, Research Director at IDC, in the Business Wire release.

Customer-Facing Risks and Rewards

Dougherty, in a theCUBE interview at NRF, stressed the high stakes of customer-facing GenAI. ‘The riskiest place to use GenAI in retail is also the most valuable one: the customer experience,’ Dataiku posted on X, linking to video footage. Retailers are shifting AI from back-office to visible moments, demanding robust safeguards against hallucinations via domain-specific training and proprietary data.

SiliconANGLE reported Dougherty noting fewer than 10% of retailers are truly AI-ready, with trust and process governance as key differentiators over model access. ‘Fewer than 10% are truly ready, as the real differentiators are trust and process governance—not just access to models or large-scale license deployments,’ he said, per SiliconANGLE.

This aligns with broader NRF themes, where AI dominated sessions—one-third titled around it—focusing on category management, marketing, supply chain, and shopper insights. SymphonyAI observed intense interest in quantifiable impacts, with GenAI eliminating tedious data tasks for planograms and forecasts, as in their NRF recap.

Scaling Use Cases Enterprise-Wide

Dataiku’s retail accelerator includes seven ready-out-of-the-box use cases for accelerated impact, from structuring unstructured data via entity extraction to LLM-enhanced next-best-offer predictions for personalized campaigns. ‘Dataiku’s LLM-Enhanced Next Best Offer use case aims to predict the best product recommendation system to craft dedicated marketing campaigns for each customer,’ the blog explains.

In supply chain, GenAI augments ML demand forecasting, turning analytics into action for analysts selecting SKUs, markets, and timelines. A global fashion retailer deployed a custom chatbot to 16,000 employees using Dataiku, transforming internal knowledge sharing, according to the GenAI use cases post.

NRF sessions echoed this, with Tractor Supply’s CEO Hal Lawton describing GenAI for customer service alerts and monitoring, while Ulta Beauty crafts personalized digital experiences. Chain Store Age highlighted NRF 2026’s focus on data foundations for agentic AI, enabling phygital unification without new models, in their analysis.

Governance as the New Battleground

As adoption surges—retail leading data/AI investments per Databricks—governance gaps persist. Dataiku’s Agent Hub centralizes agent management, offering no-code creation, monitoring, and IT oversight. Partnerships with Snowflake, Databricks, and NVIDIA operationalize secure AI, Dougherty noted on the NRF speaker profile.

TipRanks covered Dataiku’s workflow orchestration, consolidating prep, modeling, and deployment for business user involvement and MVP-to-production speed, signaling competitive edge over point solutions, via their update.

With NRF 2026 drawing record exhibitors amid agentic AI hype, Dataiku positions retailers to harness GenAI’s full potential—trusted, scalable, and integrated—steering operations from insights to autonomous action.