Juanita Neville-Te Rito

Every year, the gia Excellence in Retailing Awards - the Global Innovation Awards for home and housewares retail - put stores from over 30 countries side by side and celebrate the best of them. The New Zealand winner of the Excellence in Retailing award is flown to The Inspired Home Show in Chicago in March 2027. Finalists in the Top Window and Digital Commerce categories join them if they progress to the global final round, recognised alongside some of the sharpest retailers in the world....

87% of New Zealand businesses are already using AI, but most are still stuck between experimentation and execution. In this launch piece, RX Group and thecolab.ai unpack why so many AI initiatives fail to scale and introduce rxcolab.ai, a specialist ANZ retail AI venture focused on practical implementation, operational capability, and measurable commercial outcomes.

Retailers are racing toward agentic commerce with the best of intentions. They're cleaning their product data, optimising for AI discovery, signing up to platform partnerships. Every decision makes sense in isolation. Together, they form a trap. The platforms driving this are deeply unprofitable. The fee model is already live in the US. A Board Director told me recently that "AI can do all this stuff for free." I said...Ask OpenAI about their $14 billion loss this year.