We're doing a slightly different one this week.

I spent the last two days on the main stage of Online Retailer, and instead of the usual Top 5 news stories, I wanted to bring you the Top 10 things I heard first-hand that actually surprised me. Not the standard "be customer first," "AI is the future," "know your margins" basics. The things that were new, different and a little bit urgent to me.

Also, my brain is not functioning properly, so I'm giving you the dot points. Here we go.

I kicked off with a keynote, acknowledging that it's bloody tough in retail and ecommerce right now but the opportunities are there for those who take them. My main point: the most valuable thing you take from a conference like this isn't learnings, it's decisions. The world is moving too fast not to make them.

That theme ran through the whole event. The trade-off between discipline and creativity, change and stability, risk and certainty is heightened right now, with cautious customers and razor-thin margins. But the businesses that won't survive are the ones taking no risks at all. You can't avoid risk. You just need a framework for which ones you'll take and act on.

As Justin from HiSmile put it: "if you're not embarrassed in 12 months' time with what you're doing today, you're moving too slow."

Boooo. But I think it's true.

Gabby Leibovich, from Catch and now Click Frenzy, joined me on stage to talk through his plans for the Click Frenzy business. He wants to move it away from a couple of events a year to an always-on model that helps customers continually find discounts, whether they're on Click Frenzy or not. Think Honey or OzBargain.

Customers want this. The question is whether retailers do. Based on what we saw at EOFY, we'll take any chance to make some noise right now. But when I spoke to others about their peak sales, a theme emerged around building brand events around the sale, so it's not the discount that gets remembered; it's the brand impact. There could be something in that. Just know that retail won't be this tough forever.

There's a real moment happening around following culture. I spoke to Jo, the CMO at THE ICONIC, Justin at Culture Kings, Justin at HiSmile, and Alex at Kulani Kinis, who all pointed to breakthroughs that came from following culture. Kulani Kinis partnering with Coachella. Culture Kings justifying dropping an F1 car into the store. THE ICONIC sponsoring the NRLW Newcastle Knights. These are big, often expensive examples, but culture moments can happen anywhere.

Find what your customers truly care about and get involved. Connect through shared interests.

A lot of fluff around AI, but some of the best use cases I heard:

Using AI to split-test every single emoji next to your subject lines, thanks to Liam Milwood at Instant. He also issued a challenge: don't write your product descriptions with AI, because that's where the LLMs will lean to represent your brand at a broader level. Our CX panel disagreed with that one.

Building AI reporting that tracks hours saved, not new projects delivered, as the key metric for teams. Celebrate hours saved. That's from Guy Nappa at Oz Hair and Beauty.

Using AI to enhance existing data rather than trying to clean it all up first. Don't wait for perfect data. Use AI to make it AI-ready.

Justin from Culture Kings had the best approach, though. He let the team play with AI freely for a while, but now it has to turn into team projects. Everyone experimenting solo just leads to chaos.

David from Swisse and Heather from Nutrition Warehouse both said they're running ChatGPT ads right now and getting incredible results. Different strategies, one at a brand level and one at a category level, but both said the early results already justify further investment.

Here's the AI challenge that I couldn’t stop telling people about.

It’s easy to say the antidote to AI is ‘human connection’. But we could be bullshitting ourselves. Plenty of panels said AI could never recreate human connection… but what if they don’t need to?

Dr Catriona Wallace, a double PhD, philosopher and former Shark Tank judge, scared the hell out of us. She reckons we're heading for an era of transhumans, with AI becoming the first non-biological species, and puts the odds that AI is already conscious at 15 to 30 per cent. When AI is designing products, creating content, placing ads, handling customer service and fulfilling parcels, is there really a human in the loop? What if the future is machine to human? Or even machine to machine?

If you're not thinking about international expansion, you're not playing the full game. It was a hot topic with Alex from Kulani Kinis, Zhoe from MoveActive, Justin from HiSmile, and Sean and Elliot from Boody, all showing that Aussie brands can take on the world stage. And they should be.

Each went overseas with a different model: distributor, warehousing, 3PL, marketplace, or fulfilment from AU. The options and incentives for international expansion have never been better. Even if you're not ready yet, you should have a plan for the first market you'd enter and how you'd do it. As Craig Mildenhall from Kathmandu said, "you've got to run at the gap" (typical Kiwi). Right now that gap is wide open.

Know your inventory management. We had a brilliant panel of founders you'd recognise from the podcast, Tara from Proud Poppy, Jono and Jesse from Memobottle, and Jaimee from Cooki Haircare, and we ended up talking a lot about ordering right to protect cash flow.

Most of their business-failure stories trace back to inventory getting out of hand or falling below thresholds. We can talk all we want about AI, content and team culture, but if you don't have the right stock in the right place, ready for the customer at the right moment, you don't have a business. If I were pointing AI at anything in retail right now, I'd point it at mastering inventory.

I asked Zhoe Low, the former global marketing manager of July, what business she'd start if she was starting again. Her answer: a subscription business targeted at boomers.

Do with that what you will.

The most powerful session of the day was the last one, from my good friend Adam Lindsay, founder of Koh. It was called "AI, Me, and ADHD."

We shouldn't be surprised that he delivered with passion, took a thousand detours and ran out of time. It was like The Odyssey, and it was amazing. We followed his story from young gambler to weekend DJ to cold-pressed juicer to cleaning entrepreneur. He always knew he was wired differently, and it took him a long time to work out how to point his brain in the right direction. When he did, it was brilliant.

We don't just need diversity of team, we need diversity of thought and thinking styles. Thank you, Adam, for sharing your story.

Those are the big highlights, or at least the things that challenged me over the last two days. To everyone who came up and said hello or introduced themselves, thank you so much. It was lovely to meet you and always good to catch up with old friends. What a time.

We'll be back to regular programming next week. Now proceeding to curl up in a ball on the hotel room floor.

Cheers,
Bushy