Today’s most consequential retail technology investments have little to do with making things better, and more to do with redesigning them entirely. stores, opening checkout to Apple Pay, Google Pay , Samsung Pay, contactless cards and wearables after years of steering shoppers toward its own payments ecosystem. Amazon , meanwhile, ismoving billions of dollarsin the opposite direction of the shopping journey: deeper into the computing infrastructure required to power artificial intelligence. One removes friction at the cash register; the other involves chips, data centers and capital markets. The intelligence and customer relationship surrounding it are becoming harder to surrender.