If you attended NRF ’26 or followed the conversations coming out of it, the direction of travel was clear: AI is no longer a buzzword on the retail agenda; it’s THE AGENDA.
At the executive level, the discussion has moved firmly toward agentic systems — AI that doesn’t just inform decisions but acts on them, designing customised customer experiences and enabling a more effortless sales journey. At a strategic level, retailers are embedding AI into the core of their organisations to enable faster, more holistic business decisions. The ambition is real, and frankly, it’s impressive.
On stage, speakers outlined visions of smarter, AI-driven product search, intelligent sales support tools, and experiential concept stores built to deliver personalised brand moments. The future of retail, as presented at NRF, is frictionless, data-driven, and highly automated.
And then we asked our question.
“How do you process cash in your stores?”
We probably shouldn’t let our competitors know, but it works almost every time. At our stand, we spoke with store managers, area managers, field teams, and loss prevention professionals. Every retailer with a physical footprint confirmed what we already suspected: their stores handle cash every day. And around 70% of them told us that cash counting is still fully or mostly manual in their business.
In 2026.
The gap between the strategic and the operational
Here’s what that actually looks like on the ground. While retail’s future is being carefully architected at a strategic level — stores fitted with interactive zones, large LED screens, digital shelf labels, and AI-driven assistant robots — many store managers are ending their shifts counting each till by hand, or relying on basic note counters that, as more than one person told us, “jam all the time.”
The daily routine for many store managers still involves reconciling tills against POS reports using a phone calculator, resolving discrepancies, cross-checking Excel spreadsheet printouts, and staying late to prepare bank deposits — which they then deliver to the bank themselves, either after close or the following morning.
This isn’t a failure of individual managers. It’s simply how the process has always worked, and in the absence of a clear mandate to change it, it has persisted — despite the obvious costs and risks involved.
Why this matters more than it might seem
The contrast we observed at NRF wasn’t striking because cash is still widely used — that’s hardly a revelation, and perhaps unsurprising coming from us. What made it striking is what it implies about the way retailers think about post-payment operations.
Retailers routinely plan with extraordinary precision around every step of the customer journey. But once a cash payment goes through, many organisations quietly accept a set of outcomes they would never tolerate elsewhere: reconciliation discrepancies, cash losses attributed to human error or malpractice, and significant visibility lags in a business environment built on real-time reporting.
Cash gets labelled a cost. The process gets filed under “that’s just how it works.” And the gap between strategic ambition and operational reality quietly widens.
The technology to close that gap already exists
If the broader retail conversation at NRF pointed to anything, it’s that technology-enabled execution should run through every layer of a business — not just the customer-facing parts. The operational data generated at store level is exactly what agentic systems further up the chain need to make reliable, real-time decisions. Manual cash handling, with its inherent delays and inaccuracies, is a weak link in that chain.
The good news is that the technology to count, store, and recycle cash — to make it reconcile cleanly with the rest of your business — has been around for some time, and it has matured significantly. Today’s cash automation solutions offer high-speed processing, near-perfect accuracy, seamless POS integration, and the kind of durability built for daily retail use. They’ve also become considerably more accessible across different store formats and business sizes.
Automated cash handling isn’t a niche solution for large-scale retailers anymore. It’s a practical, available option for any business that wants its back-office operations to keep pace with its front-of-house ambitions.
If any of this resonates — whether you’re actively reviewing your cash processes or just beginning to think about where manual operations are holding your business back — we’re always happy to talk it through.
BGP helps retailers close the gap between strategic vision and operational reality through cash automation and retail technology solutions.