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Laura Cantor, VP of Marketing & E-commerce at New York & Company, shares the reality of transforming a legacy retail brand in the age of AI - and why nobody can do it alone.

In this episode:

🚀 Leading digital transformation at a legacy retail brand

🤖 Using AI to find 500+ site issues (and the problems AI creates)

💻 Moving from Shopify Hydrogen to Liquid right before Black Friday

🤝 Why partnerships replaced competition in retail

🧠 AQ (Adaptability Quotient) - the skill that matters most

📱 Building in public and learning together

⚡ The reality of doing more with less in 2025

🎯 Why every problem now has 10 AI solutions (and nobody knows which works)

Key topics:

- The shift from headless back to Liquid (and why simplicity won)

- AI-powered site QA and the translation gap

- Why collaboration beats secrecy in the AI era

- Post-COVID conference culture and community building

- Adaptability and unlearning in real-time

- NRF insights and retail trends for 2025

- The calculus class we're all failing together

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro

1:30 - Laura's retail background (Ralph Lauren, J.Crew)

2:10 - New York & Company's digital transformation journey

4:40 - The biggest challenges: doing more with less

8:15 - AI creates problems AND solutions (the QA challenge)

15:50 - Why we moved from Hydrogen to Liquid

21:10 - The post that resonated across the industry

28:30 - Why partnerships matter more than competition now

33:00 - How agile teams adopt AI tools

36:35 - We're all failing calculus together

39:00 - Adaptability Quotient (AQ) - the new essential skill

44:50 - The power of clarity: translating robot to human

52:30 - Why retail is fundamentally a people business

55:45 - Upcoming events (eTail West, ShopTalk, Commerce Next)

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Ep 586: Laura Cantor: Digital Transformation, AI Collaboration, and Why We're All Failing Calculus Together

DTC Podcast