The future of commerce.
Commerce is where most people meet new technology, and physical AI is about to change it. This track studies two sides of that shift. The first is the selling floor: how embodied AI, from in-store systems and smart fixtures to robots that can show, explain, and hand over a product, changes how goods are sold and how customers experience a store. The second is the workforce. As physical AI enters retail and sales, the people who work in commerce need new skills, and some roles change or move. The question the track is built around is how to develop that workforce so the technology raises what people can do instead of replacing them, and how a business can put physical AI to work on the floor in a way that actually sells.
The track is led by Kat Moore, EdD, MBA, an Industrial Research Fellow hosted in the Glass Lab, drawing on a career in sales and education. The workforce half of the work sits squarely in the lab's own subject: how a frontline workforce is trained for equipment that changes yearly.
↓ White paper · PDFRead onlineTR-2026-31 · market & economic review
The review assembles eighteen deployment and withdrawal records into one graded ledger. Ten of the eighteen were closed, cancelled, converted or materially reduced, which is the finding that sets the training problem: a curriculum tied to a specific vendor system outlives the system. The second half reads the labour series, where the aggregate is not collapse but a change in the shape of the entry-level role.