The Connected Supply Chain - Why Retail's Profit Winners Are 555% Better at BOPIS

S2E9 Greg Buzek of IHL Group on RFID, Computer Vision, Edge Computing, and the Returns Opportunity with AI

Buy online pickup in store sounds like a solved problem. It’s not. In IHL Group’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study, only 18.2% of retailers have optimized BOPIS, and the most profitable retailers are a staggering 555% more likely to have it dialed in than the laggards. In the finale of our 3-part AI in Retail miniseries, Greg Buzek, President and Chief AI Orchestrator at IHL Group, joins Ricardo and Casey to unpack the connected supply chain, the unglamorous infrastructure quietly separating retail’s winners from everyone else.

This is the conclusion of our three-part run with Greg. We started with shelf intelligence, moved to the augmented associate, and now we land on the part of retail that keeps executives up at night: supply chain and returns. If you want to understand why the connected supply chain decides who wins on margin in 2026, start here.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

● Why the most profitable retailers are 555% more likely to have buy online pickup in store fully optimized, and why only about 18% of the industry has solved BOPIS

● How RFID and computer vision became the two technologies separating winners from laggards on inventory accuracy in the connected supply chain

● Why computer vision now runs on the edge for under $500, on hardware as simple as a Raspberry Pi tapping into cameras you already own

● How edge computing ties RFID and computer vision together so you only process what moved

● Reverse logistics and retail returns: why a $25 item is often cheaper to give away than to take back

● Aspirational sizing and the 90%-plus return rate on women’s dresses bought online, and how true fit technology with AI changes the math

● Return fraud, knockoffs, and how RFID plus computer vision verify whether an item was ever in your connected supply chain

● The one 2026 priority Greg would give every supply chain leader: clean data and a single version of the truth