You can see AI everywhere in Retail, except in the P&L

The conversation has been about the tech. It should be about how you really move the needle.

In the early 1920s, Henry Ford called in Charles Steinmetz to diagnose a fault in a large electrical generator that his own engineers had failed to fix. Steinmetz asked for a notebook, a pencil, and a cot. For two days and nights, he listened to the generator and filled pages with calculations. On the second night, he climbed up, made a chalk mark on the casing, and told Ford's engineers to remove the plate at that location and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did. The generator ran perfectly.

Ford queried the $10,000 invoice. Steinmetz sent an itemised version: "Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999."