Can AI Replace Retail Leadership? What Executives Need to Prepare For

0:00

Welcome to Under the Brand. I’m your host, Valerie Jennings. Today I’m joined by April Sabbrrell. April, I’m so excited to have you here. Actually, I’m going to read part of your bio to give you full justice, because you have had an incredible career and one that should be celebrated.

0:19

So just skimming through this, you have 30 years of experience leading iconic retail teams. Wow, that is incredible. And you’ve worked with big brands such as Starbucks, Gap, Banana Republic, and David’s Tea, and done leadership training for top brands like Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch — one of my favorites — Sunglass Hut, Victoria’s Secret, and more.

0:45

How did you do all of that? That’s just incredible. Please share.

0:51

I don’t know. I must be a crazy person.

0:57

No, not at all. Very successful. So how did you start in retail?

1:04

Yeah, thanks so much. First of all, thanks so much for having me on your show. I’m so excited to be here with you. Your energy is awesome, so thank you.

1:15

So how I got started in retail: like many people in retail, I was just a young teenager who got kicked out of home because I was quite unruly, I would say, back in the UK. And I had to get a job, and the easiest job to get a lot of times is retail or hospitality, just because you don’t need to have a formal education for it.

1:35

So I got a job in a retail store when I was a mere 17 years old, and it gave me purpose. It gave me a voice. It made me feel valued, because I was helping customers. At that time I wasn’t feeling very good about myself, being young and not knowing what to do with my life.

1:47

And then I literally just kind of stayed with it to pay my bills, and it became a career. A lot of us in retail actually call it the accidental career, because it really is accidental. A lot of us go into it thinking we’re going to do it until we find our way and do something else.

2:07

And then what happens is, if you love people and you love service, it becomes part of your purpose and your mission. So I just feel very, very fortunate. It ended up being a 30-year career that wasn’t planned.

2:26

I kept getting recruited to bigger roles, and I really think I was in the right brands at the right time in the UK back then. Gap was opening all of their stores, and I got to meet Don and Doris Fisher, the founders, when I was like 20, in a store visit, which was really wild.

2:39

And then Starbucks had come to the UK, so I opened some Starbucks stores and met Howard Schultz and read his book, Pour Your Heart into It, the first leadership book I ever read. And it changed my life. It got me very interested and curious about leadership and the impact of leadership. So I strive to be a good person to be managed by, and to be a good manager, and it always helped.

3:04

And then I came to the US because my parents are American, so I had a passport, with Starbucks. And then I ended up going to Canada with Banana Republic and just continued to grow in role and in store count. At the end, after working at Apple and other Canadian brands, I was a senior vice president over 250 stores for David’s Tea.

3:30

Yeah, so I could have never forecast that.

3:36

Wow. It’s a testament to your success. And it’s not all just being in the right place at the right time. It does take hard work. Everybody on social media makes it look so easy, right? But running retail is really hard, very competitive.

3:49

And now, welcome AI. Retail reinvented. Now what? You’ve had this 30-year career, and now AI. What does that look like? And not just for the big brands, but for a lot of regular retail stores — this is a game changer. So give us your take on that.

4:17

Yeah. So when I left the traditional role and created a learning and development company about five years ago now, it was really to reinvent the traditional learning path. Because as somebody who was in stores and didn’t go to school, I loved to learn through bite-sized content, very easy to understand, easy language, not highly intellectualized. And I find that the simpler the way you communicate things, the better. That’s how people learn.

4:38

So we have this resource of all of these courses that we innovated, and we did four-minute video lessons, like YouTube snippets, five years ago. And so with AI coming in, trying to innovate again and innovate the way that people learn, we’re using AI now to distill a course of five video lessons and a workbook and everything into an AI conversation between an AI version of me and somebody else, like a podcast style. So it’s really wild. It’s really cool.

5:13

Is that kind of creepy?

5:13

It is a little creepy. But when you hear it, it’s so engaging. I’m listening to it, learning my own content and frameworks.

5:19

And along with that comes now the ability to have an AI clone of me, like a coach, right? And the thing about AI coaches that people need to understand is that they’re out there everywhere now. It’s not hard for people to do it, but you have to train it on the word count that you actually pour into it to make it sound like you.

5:42

So because I’ve now written four books, 25 online courses, Forbes articles, all these things, we’ve fed about 450,000 words into it — and we can do up to 10 million to get it really, really well trained. And it literally sounds like me now.

6:02

My superpower was always influencing people in a positive way through language and communication, to get them to move forward and go into change, because retail is always changing, right? Much like hospitality, it’s always changing. So that was my superpower. I could frame things in a way that people would go, “Yeah, I want to go with you and do that.”

6:22

So now that AI coach does that, because it takes all of my language model and helps you rewrite emails, or coach somebody if you’re not really sure what to say to get a positive outcome. All of these things — how to hold somebody accountable but not make them feel bad. All of these superpowers that I had when I was doing the job, you can now actually have access to. So that’s where it’s going.

6:40

And I think the reason why is because people text me all the time and say, “I’m having this problem with X, Y, and Z. This happened this weekend, and I don’t know, I want to say it in a better way.” And I’m like, “Just ask my coach.” And they’re like, “But I want to ask you.” And I say, “Yeah, but it’s trained like me. It literally coaches me today. It sounds like me.”

7:08

Wow. And it’s a total societal shift to trust AI, and people are still trying to — how are you finding that?

7:15

Oh, I mean, I love technology. I am an early adopter of tech and rapidly adopt it. And here’s what I love about AI: it analyzes so much data so quickly, which our brains either don’t have the capacity to do, or definitely not at the speed that AI does it.

7:40

And it’s some of the basic problem solving. I read a study this week that said, well, AI can’t solve complex puzzles and logic. And I’m like, I don’t need it for that. Crunch data, analyze numbers, dream big. Our team has great creative ideas, but AI takes those ideas and gives them more depth.

7:59

I was talking to a co-worker earlier today and he said, “I feel guilty using AI because it’s so fast.” And I’m like, “Yes, but there are other things you can do. Just think about all the other things you could be working on or dreaming up.” Now you can spend more time on strategy and less time on the minutia.

8:24

April, for the retail industry — because what you’re describing is mass disruption. Training and scaling retail teams and stores is huge. What advice do you give to retailers, big and small, about AI? What to look out for, what to embrace, and what to watch out for or stay away from, if you will?

8:52

Yeah, it’s an interesting question, because this week I was having a call with a client who I was training on how to use ChatGPT — just to do some OKRs, to do some crunching, like you said. Here’s my problem, and it’s going to help you iterate and creatively problem solve, which then trains you to be more creative, I think.

9:13

So we were working on that, and he was really nervous about putting his numbers in, and his this and that and the other, and, “Oh, but then everybody’s going to have access to it, my competitors.” And I said, well, just scenario it out.

9:26

So one of my pieces of advice, if you’re really nervous about sharing your information but you’re trying to brainstorm and problem solve, is just scenario it. So, “I run a florist in this city and it does this much a year, and this is the problem I’m trying to solve. I’m trying to come up with a new business model to add growth to the business.” You don’t need to put the name of it in.

9:48

I think people need to learn how to speak to it so that they can get the best out of it. But that goes back to communication skills and leadership skills. The number one thing we teach is how to communicate and ask questions. And people don’t know how to do that.

10:05

You’d be surprised, but so many people do not know how to ask questions, or they make judgments and assumptions all day. I saw a quote recently that was like, the illusion of communication is that we’re actually not connected and having a conversation. We’re just talking at each other.

10:16

So I think my advice is to learn how to use it in the areas of your business and bring it in as an ally and not a replacement, because I think there’s a statistic that 89% of people are fearful that it’s going to take their job.

10:36

And I know I’m really nerdy — I like doing these searches on Google that say how many people are searching this question. And when you ask how many people are searching “how do I improve my AI skills,” it’s a ridiculous amount, like 450 million. But when you add “at work” at the end of it, it doubles.

10:53

So my advice to leaders in retail is to know that that exists in your employees and your teams, and so address it. Have a strategy. Talk about how you’re going to bring in AI. What’s your vision around it for your teams? Because if you’re not addressing it, you’re not addressing the fears that people inherently have.

11:12

And then we all know what happens when people aren’t communicated a vision. They’re all confused. So I think you have to really have a communication strategy, and then learn, start small, start practicing.

11:23

Yesterday I gave somebody some homework. I said, “Okay, what’s the next problem you want to solve on your to-do list? By the time we touch base next week, you will have iterated this and then come and show it to me.” Three years ago when we were coaching, we were not doing that.

11:34

No, we didn’t have the tech to do that.

11:41

Yeah. So I think start small. And then, what am I concerned about? I just don’t think it’s going to replace people and the human touch in terms of store experience. I’m on the store side. Retail is a big industry, but I ran stores.

11:52

And I think that getting the mundane tasks out of the way, saving payroll in those areas, and then fueling that payroll back into store experience and human experience, is what retailers should be doing in the future.

12:07

The first thing that gets cut when sales are bad or tariffs are talked about is always store labor payroll, because it’s such a big expense. But I don’t think you should be thinking that. I think you have to reframe and retrain your brain to ask, how can AI cut some other areas and not touch that part of the business, so that we can continue to enhance the customer experience?

12:32

Yeah, those are great points. I want to go back to what you said about leadership needing to embrace and train and help their teams overcome this fear that AI is going to replace them. That was very much the conversation I had with my co-worker this morning and a couple of other co-workers.

12:50

We were saying, “Oh my gosh, not just AI, but other tech is getting so good that it’s automating a lot of the work, the day-to-day grind.” And so my advice, similar to yours, was to find other ways to be strategic and dream big.

13:10

And I think that’s scary for people, because there’s no limit, really. You can dream as big as you want. Now, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but it’s a great place to be. And that’s such an essential skill, that as we’re in this creative era, we have all this tech that actually can make big dreams possible. They weren’t possible a few years ago.

13:35

Yeah. And then when you iterate and brainstorm on these big dreams, somebody has to execute it, right? That’s where the people come in. And also to look at it and go, yeah, that’s not really what we can do, or the budget won’t allow it.

13:48

Do you think as well that people are afraid of exposing that maybe they’re not as creative or productive as they could appear to be? So maybe there’s a fear around that.

14:05

So I think now, getting in the seat of spending some time learning and educating yourself on it — and then if you become that person on your team who’s the go-to person, like, oh, you know how to use ChatGPT really well, or Claude, or Copilot, any of the AI tools out there, there are millions of them — if you become that go-to person…

14:28

I was literally walking around a conference last week in New York, and somebody who I love dearly, another retail consultant, ran up to me with one of her clients and was like, “Oh my God, hold on, she has a pitch in five minutes. You’re really good at talking to ChatGPT. Can you just help us get what she needs?” And I was like, “Sure, give me the phone.”

14:47

So I’m becoming useful, right? Because I’m now like a reference point, like an interview architect or a prompt architect, if you like, in my peer group. So that’s kind of interesting, because I was like, you could ask the same question, but they don’t know how to.

15:03

No, it’s the prompts, and I get that too. “What was your prompt?” And I’m like, oh, maybe I should keep my prompts hidden somewhere. Apparently they’re coveted.

15:09

I think you’re a curious person, right? You come from curiosity. You’re like, “Oh, I have this thought and I really want somebody to think it through with me and solve this with me, and maybe potentially save me some time, because I don’t think I know best.”

15:22

And I think that requires a level of selflessness, no ego involved, right? But I think if you position yourself in your team, in your organization, as a prompt architect, you’re going to become very, very useful.

15:41

Like 100%. And it’s not that difficult to do, if you’re actually asking the right questions, like you said. A curious person.

15:48

Okay, you have worked with all these amazing brands. Favorite story of all time. You’ve got to give some scoop. What has been either the most rewarding or shocking, or like, wow, I will treasure that memory for life? Of all these brands that you’ve worked on, you’ve got to have one good story in there.

16:12

Oh Lord. I’m thinking about the book that I wrote, right? There are so many great stories, but I think I’ve had some really great learning moments, and some pivotal moments with people in my career, that really taught me things that will never ever leave me.

16:29

I remember I had a leader who was quite tough, actually. She was quite tough, but she literally sat me down one day when I was a store manager and I was not doing all the things I was supposed to do. I wasn’t really completing the admin tasks, because I was always a people person. I was on the floor. I was always talking to the customers, and I would deliver the sales goals.

16:47

So they always made me the last person they’d count on at the end of the month or end of the week to hit those goals. And she said, “You know, April, you’re amazing at X, Y, and Z, but if you don’t do this part of your job, you’re never going to move forward and get promoted.”

17:02

I’ve had three people in my career who sat me down at a point and said, “You’re doing this really well, but to get ahead, you need to make sure that this happens. And if you don’t, you won’t.”

17:14

And so these pivotal conversations are really memorable to me, because that’s what built the foundation of the accountability framework that we teach today. And you’d think that sounds really simple, but so many leaders shy away from telling somebody on their team, if you don’t do this, you won’t get that.

17:32

And that’s in our accountability framework. It’s a step — it’s number three, where it’s agree to mutual consequences in advance, so there are no surprises. And so I remember her for that.

17:43

I remember another leader who actually had the same conversation, different situation, same structure of conversation. And they propelled me forward, because I went home that night and was like, “Oh no. I’m not going to be able to get there. I’m going to change my behavior and make an effort and make a commitment to actually do the things that she’s telling me to do.” And I got promoted both times.

18:03

So I think a lot of times leaders are waiting to get promoted, and waiting for people, or are scared to have real honest conversations. So I think those are very memorable moments.

18:15

And then the million-dollar chocolate bar story that’s in the book, that I tell on stage every time — everybody remembers that. It’s the story of what I thought I could not achieve. My limiting beliefs were getting in the way of my team achieving a sales goal, based on evidence versus possibility. And I had a leader challenge me on this.

18:41

She said, “Well, if you can’t believe it, you won’t achieve it.” And I was thinking, she’s out to lunch. We’ve never hit that sales goal. How are we going to do it? Everything tells us that we can’t, because in retail we’re always trying to beat last year’s numbers. There’s always a percentage increase. It’s like, let’s do 10%, 20% more. And she was asking us for literally a 45% increase, and we were like, we can’t do it.

19:04

So she challenged my belief, and it was the best thing she ever did, because I came back and I said, she’s right. And we beat the goal. We had like a 52% lift. And it taught me a very big lesson: that as a leader, my limiting beliefs will limit my team’s achievements.

19:19

So I talk about that in the book, and I train it in workshops, which I just did with Tory Burch. We did a whole workshop on our limiting beliefs as leaders, and how they derail our company and reaching our sales goals.

19:33

Wow. What is the best tip out of that? I know it’s a whole thing, but that translates to everybody.

19:41

It does.

19:41

We all have limiting beliefs, either about ourselves or — especially data people like me. I’m the same way. I look at the numbers, or I hear a story based on data and historical trends, and somebody asks for something crazy and I’m like, yeah, no. Today I think I said, “That sounds insane.” Somebody was describing a situation to me and I said, that sounds insane. But what is that? Is that just our internal—

20:12

Yeah, it’s the way that we’re wired. Our brains are wired to protect us. And so when we actually accomplished the goal, it was because I had set a vision and a visual aid that we could.

20:24

It sounds really funny, but I created these chocolate bars with the sales goal on them, and I sent them to everybody, and I said, “When we achieve the goal, we’re going to eat the chocolate bars and celebrate.” And we beat the goal.

20:29

So what it taught me is, first of all, challenging my own limiting beliefs — is it possible? And instead of saying we can’t do it, starting to say we can, and asking how do we do it? How do we achieve this goal? What’s possible? What can we do, versus what can’t we do?

20:51

And we use a three-step framework called Release, Reach, and Reframe. So you release the negative thought, the limiting belief, which is the thought that goes, “I can’t do this. We’ve never done it before. We’ve never seen it. Nobody’s ever been able to do that. We don’t have the traffic. We don’t have the weather.” For retailers it’s, we don’t have the traffic, we can’t do it, we don’t have the product, we don’t have the promotion. All of these things I used to hear from stores all the time.

21:17

So we do an activity around writing those down, because those are all the things that are keeping you stuck. These are all the thoughts that are keeping you stuck, which is your limiting belief, because your belief is just a thought that’s repeated over time. So when you understand that, you can start to repeat a new thought.

21:28

And then we reach for a new thought. We say, okay, so how can we turn this into a positive thought? What can we do? And we start to write new affirmations, new thoughts. It’s like, I’m choosing to believe that anything is possible. I’m choosing to believe that if we do the right things and we come together as a team, we’ll hit the goal.

21:47

When you start moving everybody toward that, and then say how it’s going to feel when you all achieve it — which is almost metaphysical practices, manifesting, all of that — but it works. It’s practical. So when you get everybody in that mindset, and then, how’s it going to feel when we achieve it? We’re going to celebrate. That’s what I learned.

22:04

And so that’s the three-step framework that we teach in the workshops, and it applies to your life too, Valerie, right? Like everybody.

22:19

Yeah, all of us carry so many limiting thoughts from childhood on up, and we all have these life themes that develop that limit us as leaders.

22:31

I agree with you, but I love this exercise. It’s very vision-driven and you get everybody invested. It’s not just one person at the top trying to dictate a goal and everybody’s like, “Oh, I’m scared of April right now. I’m scared of Valerie. Am I going to lose my job because they have this ridiculous goal?” But I love the fact that you get everybody in.

22:54

Yeah.

22:54

And on the same page, and everybody is vulnerable at the same time, letting go of some of this. So this is an excellent example of what AI can’t do.

23:06

Right.

23:06

This is all human stuff. Call them flaws, whatever you want to call them, but all these imperfections are what create magnificent products. Everything that’s in our existence, we’ve created, right? Good and bad. AI can give us ideas, but AI cannot control the environment of the people coming together.

23:34

No, it can’t. It can’t replicate context and emotional connection. It can’t do that. I actually asked it, because I was doing a presentation at Microsoft last year, and I asked it, “What can’t you do that humans can do?” Because I wanted to show the difference, right?

23:50

And it said, “Well, I can’t empathize with you when you’re feeling bad. I can make suggestions to make you feel better, but I can’t empathize. I can’t actually experience things like a human, so I have no context when I’m giving you advice. You have to tell me what the context is.”

24:09

So it gave me this list, and I was quite impressed. And I was like, so that’s why the human connection and leadership is going to be even more important in the future.

24:14

I think I heard four years ago that empathy coaches are going to become very essential in the future, which I can truly believe. Because our generation, the younger generation — you have a daughter, I have a son and a daughter — they’ve grown up with technology, like this all the time. So that empathy and that context of connection can be lacking sometimes, right? Because the experience isn’t there.

24:43

So yeah, I think the human connection is — and that’s what I love about stores and being in the store, because that’s where the human connection happens. It’s in the field. It’s the magic of it. And I think that’s going to continue to become very important.

24:54

Do you right now see or know of AI designing retail products, as we speak? Are they ideating the next generation of merchandise for us?

25:10

Yeah, 100%. There is virtual — I’m not on the product side, but I do engage with other consultants in the Rethink Retail world on product ideation, and they’ve been using it for some time when it comes to product ideation, and doing 3D and virtual.

25:28

And the whole metaverse — I’m lost in that. I did a class on it because I wanted to try and figure it out, and I was like, I still don’t get it. But we’ve been making digital product that sells in the metaverse for years now. So I think that’s still happening, and it’s going to continue.

25:46

It’s amazing. This week I’m working on a startup, a luggage accessory actually, and I asked AI for a concept for the unboxing, right? Because that’s such a big deal with influencers. It actually created the whole package in chat for me.

26:06

Now, it’s not exactly what we’re going to use, but it was enough to show the client what this unboxing could be. And even though this is a very basic luggage accessory, it was of course this very magnificent box with gold-plated letters and a personal note, because it’s all about the influencer experience and the feeling people get when they receive an order online. So it’s just incredible what it’s able to do.

26:42

And then on a personal note, just because I’m also very curious and I want to optimize stuff that I’m doing — I took a picture of all my skincare products, and I have quite a diverse lineup, and I put it into AI and I said, “Do an analysis on my skincare products.” And I put in a photo of my skin and asked for an analysis.

27:09

It did a full product analysis. It told me where there was duplication, where there were gaps, and it even recommended products that I should be using for my age, at age 46, for what my skincare line should be. This is crazy. So guess what? I’m going to go buy some of those products that I’m not using.

27:33

Yeah, well, that’s the thing, right? AI is changing the game in terms of retailers and people shopping now. Because up until I think three weeks ago, it wasn’t making shopping lists and linking to stores and recommendations of product. I believe that changed in the last three weeks — I saw an article about it. Which is going to change Google search, which is going to disrupt your industry a little bit in terms of ads and marketing, right? I was reading all about this and I was like, whoa, that’s wild.

28:04

Yeah, it is wild. I already know from a search standpoint that I’m getting different data back on AI than I get on Google, because what’s coming up on Google is ranking driven, right? But AI is doing research.

28:23

So if I upload that photo and ask for an analysis and then it makes recommendations on products, Google’s not doing that for me. I would have to go to Google and say, maybe I need a skincare product with peptides in it, and then it would show ads and maybe some articles that talk about the best peptide products, right?

28:44

But that’s different than what I’m getting from AI. I’m getting an analysis with recommendations and a chart with the days to use what, when. It’s very different. It’s very disruptive. And I don’t think it’s just retail, it’s across the board.

29:08

Yeah. I think SEO is going to really experience some rapid disruption here in the next even 30, 60 days.

29:20

So April, any last words of wisdom with AI and retail? Or any plugs for any books or future speaking engagements you want to tell us about?

29:35

Yeah, we’ve launched a coaching certification. Thanks for asking that. We’re running it two more times this year, where all of the workshops that I’ve been delivering and training these top global brands on for the last five years — I’m now actually opening up the workshop content, frameworks, and leadership resources to anybody who wants to come and get trained, and then have the ability to license it for a full year and use it.

30:00

Because really my goal is to create a big positive ripple of leadership. I’ve seen, when I do this training, the teams transform in the room in front of me. And then they’ve told me afterwards — even yesterday I was in the Design District, because now I’m the chamber of commerce executive director of the Design District, which I just took on. And I walked into Jimmy Choo, and she was like, “Oh my God, hold on, you were our speaker two years ago.” And she runs in the back and pulls out the book. It’s like, wow, you had such an impact on us.

30:27

And so that was just confirmation we’re doing the right thing. We’re opening it up, so it’s not just me holding on to what I know. I’m now training trainers to go out there and deliver it. So that’s very exciting, and that’s very new.

30:39

And then Ask April AI is coming out in July. So online on-demand learning, AI coaching tools, all of my resources and knowledge. And this is particularly for smaller businesses, because I’ve traditionally been delivering these workshops and leadership training to the midsize.

31:00

And so now I want to help the smaller ones, because they can’t afford me to come in as a consultant or do workshops, because the teams aren’t big enough. So we’re giving them newer programming, access to on-demand, my brain, my mind in the coach, so that they can get the resources that they need — again, spreading that ripple. And so just hoping to become the number one training company in hospitality and retail.

31:19

Oh, I’m sure you will. I don’t have any doubts. April, it was a pleasure having you. Congrats on all of your success and your insights today. And thanks to everybody for watching Under the Brand. I’m Valerie Jennings. Thank you so much.