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I spent an evening at The Lookout in Bishopsgate listening to Vercel's CPO, ElevenLabs, M&S, and Virgin Media O2 talk about building for the agent era. The view from the 50th floor was spectacular. The ideas were harder to shake.

Accio Work, launched by Alibaba International on 23 March 2026, is an enterprise AI agent platform built specifically for SMEs. No-code, multi-agent, and claiming to build an online store in 30 minutes. The adoption rate is real. What it actually means for smaller UK businesses is a more interesting question.

True one-to-one personalisation (not segments, not 'customers like you') is in production at scale in early 2026. The infrastructure is real. The results are real. So are the questions about data, consent, and where helpful ends and uncomfortable begins.

Jeremy Howard proposed LLMs.txt in September 2024 as a way for websites to communicate with AI crawlers. By October 2025, 844,000 sites had implemented it. The major AI crawlers are still largely ignoring it. So where does that leave us?

AI-powered fraud in early 2026 isn't the high-volume, low-effort credential stuffing of five years ago. It's fewer attacks, smarter attacks, and attacks that are genuinely harder to distinguish from legitimate behaviour. The industry isn't losing — but it's not comfortable either.

Google AI Overviews now appear on 48% of searches, with an average zero-click rate of 83% when they do. Between 58% and 68% of all Google searches now end without a click. The organic traffic model that UK retailers have relied on for fifteen years is structurally broken. Here's how to think about that.

Only 39% of Americans trust AI agents to make everyday purchases on their behalf. That sounds like a problem for agentic commerce. Look more closely and it's more interesting than that: trust is real, category-dependent, and building along a predictable path.

AI-generated product content is now standard for large catalogues. The tooling works. The quality variance is the problem nobody planned for, and on a 50,000-SKU catalogue, even a 1% error rate is 500 wrong product descriptions.

When the tariff announcements landed in early 2026, retailers who'd invested in AI-powered supply chain tools had a different experience than those who hadn't. The gap wasn't in the headlines. It was in the operational response time.

Adobe's Q1 2026 data shows AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year-on-year. A separate Adobe finding: product pages across the retail sector score an average 66% on machine readability. The traffic is arriving. The infrastructure to capture it is not.

At NRF 2025, Salesforce used the show to trumpet its agentic retail tools. At NRF 2026, Google's CEO unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol on the main stage. The difference was the mood in the room: less launch-day excitement, more cross-examination of work in progress.

Adobe Analytics recorded $257.8 billion in US online spending across the full 2025 holiday season. UK shoppers spent a record £26.9 billion. AI-referred traffic converted 54% better on Thanksgiving. Those are the headline numbers. The less-headline numbers are, as usual, the more interesting ones.