At this year's National Retail Federation convention in New York City, the biggest headlines went to major tech platforms and enterprise retailers. But Forbes senior contributor Joan Verdon — who has covered retail for 25 years — was paying close attention to the startups.

Out of 50 companies selected for the NRF Innovators Showcase, Verdon chose five that she believed offered genuinely next-generation solutions to some of retail's oldest problems. Voicebox was one of them.

The article describes how Voicebox works: QR codes and NFC tags placed in physical retail locations let customers send a voice message directly to the store via their phones. AI interprets the message and routes it to the right team — flagging urgent issues in real time, or queuing feedback for a follow-up.

"Everybody, even people that are very busy, can speak for two minutes. And within two minutes they can tell you so much detail."
— Karan M. Gupta, CEO of Voicebox.ai, quoted in Forbes

Verdon's framing captures exactly what sets Voicebox apart from traditional feedback tools: voice gives LLMs and AI agents something they haven't had before — unstructured, in-the-moment customer language, captured across the entire customer journey.

As Karan put it in the article: "It is that data that LLMs want — they want short text snippets, not statistics or survey responses in a spreadsheet." Voicebox gives companies exactly the data they need to learn about customers and build better programs, better technology, and better merchandise.

Verdon visited the Voicebox booth at the showcase, spent time understanding the product, and wrote a piece that connects the dots between the technology and the real retail pain point it solves — capturing customer insight at the moment it matters, wherever customers are.

The recognition from Forbes reflects a broader shift: as AI becomes central to retail operations, the quality and type of data fed into those systems is everything. Voicebox exists to ensure that data includes the actual voice of the customer.

Read the full Forbes article here.