Human warmth is the next differentiator in retail. That sounds great until you have to manage the people who produce it. Then it gets complicated.
The floor leveled out
Two years automating at Yaneken. Pricing, forecasting, segmentation, inventory. Everything that lives in data works better than ever.
But here's what I don't say at conferences: that investment isn't differentiating us. It's leveling us. Because everyone's doing the same thing. In two or three years, every serious retailer will have good pricing and good logistics. Efficiency will be the floor, not the advantage.
And when the floor levels out, what's left is what the machine doesn't do.
What can't be automated
I've seen this many times in our stores. A salesperson who, before talking product, asks the customer something. "What sport is it for?" "Is it for you?" Thirty seconds. They don't change the transaction. They change everything else — the customer drops their guard, stops comparing prices, starts trusting.
Belsport has an NPS of 93.4%. That number doesn't come from systems. It comes from thousands of moments where someone on the team chose to look at the customer instead of the screen.
The warmth premium as pricing power
There are concepts in marketing that everyone already gets. The branding premium — you pay more for Nike than a generic brand because the brand means something. The green premium — you pay more for a sustainable product because it aligns with your values. Bill Gates wrote a whole book about that one.
The warmth premium works the same way, but it's built differently. It's not a logo or a certification. It's the experience of being treated like a person. And it has a direct effect on pricing power: when a customer trusts the person selling to them, they stop looking for alternatives. They stop opening a marketplace app on their phone while standing in your store. Warmth reduces price sensitivity — not because it manipulates, but because it builds trust. And trust is the best anesthetic against comparison shopping.
This isn't theory. Every time a Belsport salesperson takes those thirty seconds to know their customer, they're building pricing power. Not with advertising. With human presence.
The trap everyone's falling into
The most common response to AI is cutting the human layer. Scripting. Measuring by speed. Chatbots wherever possible.
The result is what I call beige retail. Fast, precise, and nobody cares if they come back. Like a mall where every store looks the same.
There's something basic from strategy that applies here: when something becomes abundant, its complement goes up in value. AI makes efficiency abundant. The complement of efficiency is warmth. So warmth goes up in value. Not the other way around. But most companies are going the other way.
The really hard part — and why most companies avoid it
Let's be honest. Betting on human warmth is a lot harder than betting on technology.
Committed people have opinions. They push back. They get frustrated. A paycheck isn't enough — they need purpose, they need someone actually leading them. And when a good person leaves, you don't lose a position. You lose the relationship that person built with customers over months. You can't replace that with a job posting.
There's no algorithm that tells you how to motivate a salesperson who's having a rough week but who, when they're on, is the best in the store by far. That's leadership. And leadership is slow, expensive, and doesn't scale with a click.
But that's exactly why it's an advantage. If it were easy, it wouldn't be premium.
What AI is actually for, then
If your salesperson spends more than half their time on inventory, reports, restocking, and checklists — and AI gives them back some of that time — what you gain isn't efficiency. It's space. Space for that person to look at the customer, listen, remember who came in last week.
The dividend of automation isn't doing the same with fewer people. It's doing something different with the same people.
Bottom line
Warmth drives conversion, repeat purchase, premium perception, referrals. Everything that shows up in the P&L at year end.
But it's not free. You have to invest in people when the market's telling you to invest in tech. You have to put up with human complexity when everyone wants to simplify. You have to actually lead when most companies want to automate management.
The next premium in retail is human. It's hard. That's why it works.