In this wide-ranging conversation, Justin Honaman, head of worldwide retail, restaurants and consumer goods go-to-market at Amazon, returns to theCUBE’s NYSE studio to share how AWS is transforming the retail landscape with AI. Speaking with theCUBE’s John Furrier, Honaman details how the sector has shifted to production-scale deployments of both generative and agentic AI, with retailers eager to unlock faster innovation, real-time supply chain optimization and deeper personalization. He outlines the growing demand for custom models, clean data pipelines and integrated application layers – capabilities AWS is delivering through its Bedrock platform and expansive partner ecosystem.
Honaman also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the last NRF conference, where AI agents dominated the agenda and global retailers sought tangible outcomes, not vaporware. He highlights surprise interest in Amazon’s Project Leo satellite network as a game-changer for rural retail connectivity, and underscores the growing executive consensus that AI is now a business imperative, not an IT initiative. As retailers recalibrate their operating models for an AI-native future, Honaman sees AWS positioned as both guide and builder of the infrastructure powering retail's next chapter.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Head, Worldwide Retail, Restaurants & Consumer Goods Business DevelopmentAWS
In this wide-ranging conversation, Justin Honaman, head of worldwide retail, restaurants and consumer goods go-to-market at Amazon, returns to theCUBE’s NYSE studio to share how AWS is transforming the retail landscape with AI. Speaking with theCUBE’s John Furrier, Honaman details how the sector has shifted to production-scale deployments of both generative and agentic AI, with retailers eager to unlock faster innovation, real-time supply chain optimization and deeper personalization. He outlines the growing demand for custom models, clean data pipelines and ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What was the main topic of discussion at the NRF show a year ago and how has it evolved since then?add
What were the key focuses and topics discussed at the biggest retail event of the year at AWS?add
What are some challenges retailers face regarding their data, and how do these challenges affect their ability to leverage AI models?add
What is the current sentiment and activity level among retailers as we enter this year?add
>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at our NYSE CUBE Studios on the East Coast. Of course, we got our Palo Alto studios connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley, tech and money. The technology is the market. We got you covered. And this is retail week as NRF kicks off the year, right on the heels of CES, a one-two punch, physical AI at CES and all things connected. And now, with retail, all things agentic. As data becomes the value proposition, it's all about the infrastructure and how that's deployed. We have a return guest. Justin Honaman is here, head of worldwide retail restaurants and consumer goods, business development at Amazon. Justin, great to see you again for a repeat performance. Last year you were here.
Justin Honaman
>> A year ago, this week, right after CES, we did the first interview and I'm so glad to be back. Thanks for the invite.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And I'm glad to have you back because now we have a historical perspective. Last year we were scratching the surface. We were talking a little bit about the Just Walk Out that Amazon has, some of the things around agents and the role of data, the user experiences. Now, one year in, I mean, my hair got grayer, it's crazier. I can't believe how much success has been achieved, even in the face of all the naysayers. "Oh, agents are failing in 80%," whatever that stat was. All wrong. Was debunked by us. There are real use cases coming out of NRF where people are seeing record profits, record revenue, significant needle-moving activities.
Justin Honaman
>> No doubt. Yeah. So, first, thanks for having me back. A year ago, we had just launched actually some of our own models in the generative AI space. If you remember coming into last year, generative AI was the talk of NRF. And quite frankly, a lot of our customers were beyond just testing. They were into production in many different use cases. And we'll talk about some of those today. A year later, AI absolutely is the main topic over at the NRF show. Certainly, was for us at AWS. And in many ways, showing how customers can bring that to life, including in traditional AI, generative AI, and of course, agentic.
John Furrier
>> I got to ask you about NRF. I haven't been on the floor. Our team's been there. Bob Laliberte, one of our analysts covering the sector, as well as our other team members. One, they said 40,000-plus people. The show is buzzing. What is your verdict this year? What's your takeaway? I mean, we know agent's hot obviously there, but what was the theme? What was some of the hallway conversations? What were some of your meetings like? Take us through what's happening.
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah. So, this is our biggest retail event of the year at AWS. And for most of the companies in the tech space, it is the premier retail event of the year. For us, the big focus was on how you leverage AI in the future and how do you bring it to life now. So, we focused on a couple things. We talked about agentic AI's related to product innovation, how you can accelerate what usually takes months on end to develop a new product and bring it to market. We've showed this week how agents can work together and do that in a couple of days or weeks. We also talked about marketing and advertising and how to connect with the customer in new and different ways. We talked about omnichannel commerce, of course, and how AI is bringing things to life like AR, VR and virtual try-on. Amazing. And then, in the supply chain space, the area that where you really need an unlock in retail, there's a real opportunity for agents to work together to help with supply chain challenges or gaps, as well as how they can work together to make things more efficient and still have human in the loop. And so, when you ask about the conversations at our booth, man, packed over the three days with people wanting to learn. A lot of international customers as well as domestic. A lot of opportunities not only to do things like this in the press space, but meet the top analysts in retail, meet new and potential customers, as well as double down with existing customers on what's possible.
John Furrier
>> At AWS this year, I had a chance to speak with a couple execs on the AWS team. Colleen Aubrey, former Amazon, she's now over there throwing the big Connect and other things, Just Walk Out, some of those cool things. And Matt Garman, the CEO, and Swami, who runs all the AI stuff. The frontier agent thing announcement was huge. I think it's consistent to me from NRF that that signal is coming fast. With that whole idea of have your own model and then use the big frontier models, LLMs, and take what you need and bake it into yours, that's a winning formula, in my opinion. So, hats off to Amazon Web Services for that. But take that to the retail example, because that seems to be where the puck is going or is now, because everyone's talking about, "I need to have my data. I got to have my own models." There's also a development vibe now coming into retail. Are you seeing those things too?
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah. Interesting. So, we've invested heavily in three different levels of the AI stack, if you want to call it that. Obviously, chips, models in our platform called Bedrock, where you have model choice for all kinds of different generative AI models. And then, the application layer where you can develop and launch applications on your own, or many of our partners run their applications on AWS. But you're right, there's a lot of interest in AI, a lot of customers leaning into AI. Many of the retailers we work with struggle with their data. There's still a lot of challenges around clean data, integrated data, access to data. And then, because if you don't have good access to data or clean data, you're not going to get the good results you need and want out of leveraging AI models. So, we're involved in all aspects of that. Our customers come to us for coaching and advice, as much as the solutions that they can take advantage of with their customers and their customer relationship.
John Furrier
>> On the event here, partnerships and ecosystem, another big factor.
Justin Honaman
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> What's your take on that?
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah. So, one of our greatest value propositions in retail is our partner ecosystem. There's no doubt. It's extensive, it's global. We have it well-mapped in each geography in terms of capabilities and solutions and which partners are best for our customers to work with. And we bring that to life in our booth here. So, in our booth here at NRF, we had Stripe, we had Forter, we had Last Yard. We had multiple partners there showing what they're doing with the technology from AWS and how they're making a better customer experience, and it's a powerful differentiating factor for us. Our partner ecosystem is unique, especially because it's also aligned around retail.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Well, first of all, Amazon always had good partner network dynamics. Retail, I won't say it's slow to evolve. I mean, telco is probably the slowest vertical, but I think that's going to move a lot faster with the data and the automation. But retail, they move at the speed of money. And money's on the table, consumers vote with their wallet. And so, they're honed in on the customer. If they're not spending, all the alarms go off.
Justin Honaman
>> It's easy to get enamored with the technology, but when we sit down with the customer, we'll start with, "What's the experience you want to create for the consumer or shopper?" And if you look at the last 12 months since we last saw each other, a lot of things have shifted and changed. I mean, like the idea of shopping on a large language model or going to a large language model for search, people weren't doing that 12 months ago. The capabilities now with personalization that we've brought to life with our customers, that's different and unique, right? That's something that our customers need help with.
John Furrier
>> The LLM is the interface. Agents make that better and smarter.
Justin Honaman
>> And the consumer, all they care about is a good experience, being able to find what they want, the best price, get it when they need it. And in the meantime, our retailers, whether they're digital natives or physical store retailers, are trying to serve that customer and meet them where they are. And they come to us and our partners to say, "Okay, what do you have and how can we leverage it quickly to create a better experience?"
John Furrier
>> All right. Justin, talk about your business. You do biz dev, global, retail restaurants and consumer goods. What's it been like? What's the sentiment of the customer, enthusiastic, confident, challenging? Are they neutral? Are they just playing with options? Where are they on the spectrum attitude?
Justin Honaman
>> Good question. Yeah. So, for those that may not be familiar with our industry model, we moved to an industry-aligned model over the last couple of years. So, within our area, you have traditional retail, you have food service and the distributors in food service, you have consumer packaged goods. And now, we have restaurants. So, I think of like a Yum! Brands, for example, in that scenario. So, you're really thinking about it from a consumer industry's perspective. And what's unique about us as well is we hire people that worked in the industry.
John Furrier
>> They know the domain.
Justin Honaman
>> They've been there. They've been the buyer. They've been the ones on the customer side. So, it changes the game when you're sitting down with the customer and the customer knows you've sat in their seat. It's a differentiating factor. Okay. So, then coming into this year, we just had this conversation earlier today, a number of us, really positive momentum in retail. The retailers are leaning in, wanting to invest and to learn. Many of them have already tested out the generative AI capabilities that we have and others have. Many of them have figured out what are the good use cases and we help them to navigate that. Many of them want to at least understand agents while most are not really there yet. And so, coming into this year, you're not seeing store closings, negativity in the market, major concerns. There was a lot of optimism and a lot of companies really leaning in this week.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I was just posting on LinkedIn. A lot of folks networking, a lot of the technology is being abstracted away. Brittle IT infrastructures are moving to the cloud. And if they do maintain on-prem, it's hybrid, so it's essentially distributed computing, which works well for edge.
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah, you're right. So, when you think about a retailers, one of their biggest challenges is many of them built their e-commerce business separate from stores and that data is not integrated. So, that's a challenge that many of them are looking to address. But on the e-commerce side, you're right, moving to more flexible, modern, composable. You might hear that type of award headless capability and architecture or something that has been a priority for retailers with e-commerce and also the digital pure plays like a Mercado Libre in Latin America that's pure play, runs on AWS, competes against Amazon, but completely runs on AWS.
John Furrier
>> What's the biggest surprise this year and what is the most misunderstood story that should be told?
Justin Honaman
>> I think one interesting part of our story this week was sharing where we are today and where we're going with Project Leo, Amazon Leo. It's our Low Earth Orbit satellite business and 180 satellites have been launched, there's 3,200 more about to be launched. And now, for retailers or consumer goods brands that have locations maybe in disparate parts of their country, you're going to have access to internet. I mean, it's powerful. Think about your point of sales systems and the types of analytics that you'd like to run, but you just can't because you don't have .
John Furrier
>> Bandwidth is number one constraint on local locations.
Justin Honaman
>> I know. So, for this week-
John Furrier
>> Warehouses have the fat pipe probably, but not like some retail level. You can't be moving a lot of data. If they're using computer vision, keep that local, pass the metadata.
Justin Honaman
>> You have a lot of options with that. Right. But now, so with Leo, as those satellites get into orbit and that coverage model expands in the next couple of weeks and months, that's interesting. So, it was the analysts that visited today and the retailers that came, they all wanted to dive into agentic AI. We did that. We showed how it can work. They all wanted to dive into generative AI and things like contact center and virtual try-on and assessment of clothing and your body and how to make it better. And many of them were surprised to come and learn about where we are with Leo.
John Furrier
>> Justin, what's your focus this year? What's on your agenda? Put a plug in for what your goals are.
Justin Honaman
>> I'd say coming into this year, it's staying ahead of our customers on the AI front, so that we can help them to navigate that. And we're doing that already, but our customers, it's confusing. I mean, if you look at the last couple of years, I mean, a lot has changed. You have this launch of generative AI, you have this launch of many different types of models that, again, accessible via Bedrock. You have a lot of discussion about use cases. You have many customers saying, "What's real? What's ideal? Give me the what are others finding that's valuable where there's cost savings or efficiency? And what should I be taking advantage of?"
And so, that's something our team has been focused on is all of those buckets and applying the industry overlay. So, we're following those different technology evolutions and growth as it happens very quickly and helping our customers to understand what it means to them. That's-
John Furrier
>> And you guys have a lot of scale you bring to the table-
Justin Honaman
>> That's one of the things we're known for. Our team, the team that I have a chance to work with, is a global team. They sit in different geographies. They're aligned to the customers in those geographies. And our job is very quickly as the tech is here to be able to bring that message to them about how they can take advantage of it and get signals back. What is it you're needing, so we can be thinking about future sales?
John Furrier
>> I think your point with the low satellite orbit and the networking side is a huge deal.
Justin Honaman
>> It's unexpected.
John Furrier
>> It's not a mainstream Amazon topic, but it's super relevant for retail, healthcare. These verticals that rely on connectivity where there'll be AI factories on-premise, talking to the cloud in a distributed manner. I think that's going to be a big story.
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah. You go to Latin America and you go to some retail stores outside of a major city, like Santiago, there's not Wi-Fi, there's not cell coverage. So, this gives you an option. You go to many parts of the US and the consumer goods space and you've got manufacturing facilities in rough locations, right? And so it provides an option.
John Furrier
>> All right. Final point, I'm going to put you on the spot here. An easy one to start. Quick summary of NRF this year? Bumper sticker it for me. And then, what do you predict for next year theme?
Justin Honaman
>> So, agentic AI, no doubt was the big focus in bringing it to life for our customers. So, again, no demoware, no slideware, no PowerPoint-ware, but like actually show me how agents can work together so that I can take what's complex-
John Furrier
>> Real scenarios?
Justin Honaman
>> Right, real scenarios. And we did that around product innovation and around supply chain. Amazing, right? Double down on the generative AI use cases where customers can really take advantage of. Like in our Connect solutions, our contact center solution has got generative AI built in-
John Furrier
>> So, for next year, results will be the theme. Show me the money, show me the results.
Justin Honaman
>> No doubt.
John Furrier
>> Prove it to me.
Justin Honaman
>> Even coming into this year, it's like, again, our customers are looking for, "What are the use cases that are working? Bring those to life for me so I can take advantage of those." And I expect there to be the fastest things are moving. There'll be new technology, new models, new capabilities that we're not even talking about now. I mean, this is changing every couple weeks, That's how fast-
John Furrier
>> I mean, my big takeaway from all the interviews so far and just reading and getting the analysts from our team briefing us is that the strategy risk is not the issue. AI is clearly the strategy. It's the execution risk.
Justin Honaman
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> What are we doing? What's the sequence? What are we going after? What problems are we going after? What proof points? How do we get the flywheel going? It seems to be the theme.
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah. An example on that, just about every executive briefing we're doing now, the customer has a question about operating model. "What should be the operating model of the future? How should we be leveraging AI as part of that model? How are others doing it?" There's no one way, but what are we seeing and how can we help-
John Furrier
>> Well, my story I wrote on Sunday morning, headline is, "Retail 2026: When AI Becomes The Operating System." A little bit nerdy-
Justin Honaman
>> We did talk about that before....
John Furrier
>> very cloud, but I mean, a threshold has been crossed. All the signals point from supply chain to boardroom, everyone wants to see the operating model. What's the system? What are the key elements? What's the IO? I hate to be nerdy, but it feels like an NVIDIA-AWS tech conversation happening in a business construct.
Justin Honaman
>> Well, and when you say the word board... The ones that are doing it well, the CEO is realizing and says that AI is not the job of IT. AI is part of our business. It's a line of business priority. It involves all parts of our business. It's not just an IT product.
John Furrier
>> Well, I mean, the conversations we've been having, it's like, "Okay, this is a risk management, top-line revenue. This is a CFO, CEO, chief data officer, chief AI officer, business unit leader as stakeholders," because if the supply chain doesn't work, you lose money. If you don't get the products in front of the customer and they have a bad experience, you lose money. If you get it right, you make money. So, it's kind of like, where's the beef?
Justin Honaman
>> Absolutely. And again, all of that though, you've still got to put your customer in the center of that, so that you're not just doing technology for technology's sake or cleaning up data for data's sake, but we're doing it to make a better customer experience.
John Furrier
>> Justin, great to see you. Thanks for coming in.
Justin Honaman
>> Yeah, good to see you too. Let's do it again next year.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, make it an annual thing. A set piece in our coverage.
Justin Honaman
>> That'd be great.
John Furrier
>> Thanks for coming in. Okay.
Justin Honaman
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> AWS and Amazon, really having the building blocks. But again, this is a retail conversation. It's about AI, it's about technology, the user experience is all the new things that are going to open up, but also, the business operations, execution and all that's involved in making money and making a happy customer, it's happening here in retail and AI will be powering it and changing it. We got you covered. Thanks for watching.>> Clear.
John Furrier