Celeste Richardson has spent over 15 years in retail, in merchandising, sourcing, and digital marketing, before moving into advising retail leaders directly. Earlier in her career, she owned merchandising, vendor strategy, and omni-channel growth initiatives at retailers including Finish Line and Kohl's, work that gave her a firsthand view of the pressures and trade-offs retail teams navigate every day. Today, Celeste spends most of her time in conversation with retail executives, talking through how to modernize both the customer experience and the employee experience behind it. A frequent focus of those conversations is AI: how brands are using it to reshape shopper discovery, personalize engagement at scale, and rethink service and store operations. She's spoken at industry events including NRF and Dreamforce on these topics, alongside personalization and loyalty. Having run merchandising and omni-channel programs herself, Celeste brings a practical, operator's perspective to these conversations rather than a purely theoretical one. She enjoys digging into the case for change in retail, how brands rethink operations, personalization, customer experience, and loyalty in a fast-moving, AI-driven industry, and finding what will actually move a business forward.