NRF Taps AI for Retail's Big Show, Signals New Era for Event Engagement

NEW YORK, NY – January 08, 2026 – The National Retail Federation (NRF), the world's largest retail trade association, is fundamentally rethinking how it connects with its global audience. In a significant move signaling a broader industry shift, the NRF announced it is running customer engagement for its flagship "Retail's Big Show" on Insider One, a leading AI-native customer engagement platform. The partnership aims to transform the experience for the 40,000 retailers expected to attend the January 2026 event, moving away from mass marketing toward hyper-personalized, data-driven attendee journeys.

A Strategic Shift from 'One-Size-Fits-All'

For years, large-scale industry events have grappled with a common challenge: engaging a diverse and massive audience with relevant messaging. The NRF, whose annual show is a cornerstone of the retail calendar, is tackling this head-on. The organization recognized that in an increasingly digital-first world, "one-size-fits-all engagement no longer works." This realization prompted a strategic partnership with Insider One to dismantle data silos and build a more intelligent, responsive marketing ecosystem.

The first step in this transformation involved unifying NRF's disparate digital properties. The websites for its major events, including the Big Show and NRF Protect, have been integrated into a single Insider One panel. This consolidation creates a unified foundation for customer engagement, allowing for a holistic view of attendee interactions. By connecting data from Segment, a customer data platform, the NRF ensures that crucial registration details and behavioral insights are directly fed into its personalization engine, breaking down the barriers that previously fragmented the attendee journey.

This unified data layer is the bedrock upon which the AI-driven strategy is built. It allows the NRF to move beyond broad-stroke campaigns and begin understanding its audience on an individual level, paving the way for the kind of relevance at scale that has become the holy grail for event marketers.

Inside the AI-Powered Engagement Engine

With a unified data foundation in place, the NRF is now leveraging Insider One's sophisticated AI capabilities to orchestrate its attendee communications. Using the platform's AI-powered segmentation, the NRF can automatically identify and group audiences based on behavior, interests, and registration status. This enables the organization to "reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time," a core principle of modern marketing that is notoriously difficult to execute at the scale of an event like Retail's Big Show.

To deepen this engagement, the NRF has expanded its communication toolkit by introducing web push as a new channel through the platform. This has allowed for the rapid growth of a highly engaged subscriber base, enabling timely and personalized messaging about session updates, speaker announcements, and registration deadlines directly to attendees' browsers. This is complemented by a series of high-impact, pre-built templates, including dynamic countdown banners that create urgency and slide-out bars to promote specific content, all designed to reduce friction and maximize impact.

On-site experimentation is another key pillar of the strategy. The NRF is actively using the platform to launch A/B tests and personalized experiences tailored to different audience segments, such as engaging international attendees or spotlighting AI-focused content. Looking ahead, the federation plans to deploy Insider One's "Smart Recommender" to personalize content discovery across its blogs and other resources. This tool will serve up articles and session suggestions based on an individual's prior engagement and inferred interests, transforming a static content hub into a dynamic, personalized information source.

Insider One's Ascent in a Competitive AI Market

For Insider One, this high-profile partnership with the NRF is more than just a new client; it's a powerful validation of its market leadership and technological prowess in the fiercely competitive AI customer engagement space. The company has steadily amassed accolades from top industry analysts, cementing its position as a go-to platform for enterprises seeking to unify their customer experience.

Insider One has been named a Leader in prestigious reports such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines for three consecutive years, the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide AI-Enabled Marketing Platforms, and The Forrester Wave for Experience Optimization Platforms. This consistent recognition underscores the strength of its comprehensive, AI-native platform, which integrates a Customer Data Platform (CDP), journey orchestration, and personalization across an extensive set of channels including WhatsApp, SMS, and site search.

The platform's differentiation lies in its multi-faceted AI core, which includes "Sirius AI™," a generative AI engine that allows marketers to create complex audience segments and marketing journeys using simple natural language prompts—a feature Forrester highlighted as a unique capability. This is coupled with predictive AI for anticipating customer behavior and agentic AI for automating tasks like intelligent search and customer support. This strategic win with the NRF showcases the real-world application of these advanced features. Further distinguishing the company is its corporate structure; founded and predominantly owned by women, Insider One boasts 70% female representation in its senior executive roles, including the CEO, CMO, and CFO, making it a standout in the tech industry.

The New Standard for Large-Scale Events

The collaboration between the NRF and Insider One is emblematic of a larger, irreversible trend sweeping the event industry. AI is no longer a futuristic buzzword but a foundational technology for creating successful, engaging, and profitable large-scale gatherings. Recent industry studies show that nearly half of all event organizers are now using AI tools, with many more planning to adopt the technology in the coming year.

The imperative is clear: attendees now expect the same level of personalization from a professional conference that they receive from leading e-commerce and streaming services. AI makes this possible by enabling hyper-personalized agendas, networking recommendations, and content delivery, which in turn boosts attendee satisfaction and event ROI. By leveraging AI for predictive analytics, event organizers can better forecast attendance, manage crowd flow, and optimize resource allocation.

In adopting Insider One's platform, the NRF is not just marketing an event; it is demonstrating the very innovation it champions on its stages. The organization is setting a new benchmark for how trade associations can and should connect with their members in the digital age. This partnership serves as a powerful case study for the entire event industry, proving that by embracing a unified, AI-powered approach, it is possible to deliver relevance and impact on a massive scale, creating experiences that are smarter, faster, and built for the future of engagement.