In-depth coverage of AI in commerce, retail technology, and e-commerce innovation.
Showing 13–24 of 75 articles
As fraudsters adopt AI tools, payment providers and retailers are deploying increasingly sophisticated machine learning to protect transactions. Neither side is winning decisively, but the data advantage currently sits with the defenders.
In January 2024, NRF was full of AI announcements and cautious optimism. In May 2026, the infrastructure is built, the first data is in, and the picture is (like most things in commerce) more complicated than the enthusiasts or the sceptics predicted. Here's my honest read.
The pandemic exposed what many already suspected: historical data is a terrible oracle. Here's what the modern forecasting stack looks like for UK retailers who've moved beyond it.
After years of underwhelming chatbot experiences, AI-powered conversational commerce is finally delivering on its promise. Here's what's changed, and what the numbers actually say.
Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council on 24 April 2026. The agentic commerce infrastructure layer is no longer a conversation. It is a governance body.
Tilt launched Snap in April 2026, an AI feature that creates product listings from live video in under a second. Early testing shows a 47% uplift in sell-through rate. The mechanism is less glamorous than it sounds, and more interesting than the headline suggests.
AI-powered loyalty programmes in 2026 can predict churn 60 days out, personalise incentives at the individual level, and adjust offers in real-time based on behavioural signals. Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Boots are already doing versions of this. The results are meaningful. The questions about data and consent are overdue.
eMarketer flagged in early 2026 that retailer pushback could cloud the year's AI progress. The pushback is real, but the reasons behind it are more specific than AI fatigue. Three structural concerns, from retailers who understand the technology well enough to see the problem.
Adobe's March 2026 data shows AI-referred traffic converting 42% better than non-AI channels. That's a record, and a number that needs careful interpretation: selection effects, early adopter behaviour, and the specific nature of AI-mediated discovery all shape what it means for your planning.
TikTok Shop's 2025 full-year US GMV came in at $15.82 billion — up 108% year-on-year. The global figure was $64.3 billion. The AI recommendation engine driving that growth isn't a feature; it's the entire product. Brands that still haven't engaged with social commerce are running out of comfortable reasons not to.
Smart carts, autonomous checkout, computer vision for shelf intelligence, inventory robots. All have had conference moments. In early 2026, some are scaling. Some are quietly struggling to find their use case outside the pilot environment. The UK high street has a specific lens on this.
Digital Commerce 360 described early 2026 as a 'structural reckoning' for ecommerce. AI-powered shopping, agentic purchasing, tariff disruption, and zero-click search hitting simultaneously. The cumulative effect isn't incremental. It's a different operating environment, and here's how I'm thinking about it.
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