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The infrastructure for agentic commerce arrived in 2025. Payment rails, checkout integrations, holiday-season data — all of it landed at once. The harder question is why consumer behaviour hasn't caught up yet.

Salesforce says AI influenced $67 billion in Cyber Week sales. Adobe tracked a 693% surge in AI traffic to retail sites. The numbers are real. What they mean takes a little more work.

On 14 October 2025, Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI, giving US customers the ability to shop through ChatGPT. The headlines covered the integration. Five months later, the integration was gone. The real story had only just begun.

The Leaders Connected relaunch brought together Anna Barsby from Tessiant and Kevin Evans from Rosslyn for an evening of candid fireside conversation about data, AI, and organisational reality in the North of England. Organised by Jody Marks and Grant Spencer, it was the kind of event the Northern tech community does quietly well.

Manchester Tech Festival 2025 ran from 23 September to 2 October. The core conference was at Victoria Baths on the 24th and 25th. The dedicated AI conference followed on 1 October at DiSH MCR. A year on from the 2024 festival, the AI conversation has moved significantly. Not everywhere in the same direction.

On 29 September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, the ability to buy products directly through ChatGPT, powered by Stripe and starting with Etsy and Shopify merchants. Etsy's stock jumped 16%. The interesting questions start after the headlines.

Klarna floated on the NYSE in September 2025, raising $1.37 billion and opening 30% above its offer price. The IPO narrative was built substantially around AI as a commercial multiplier. Public markets believed enough of it. The implications for UK commerce and fintech extend well beyond Klarna's own balance sheet.

TikTok Shop now accounts for nearly 20% of US social commerce. Among under-35s in the UK, 89% say they'd consider buying through it. The algorithm is doing most of the selling work. That's worth understanding.

Enterprise retailers are pulling ahead on AI. Mid-market and smaller operators are struggling with the gap between the promise and what they can actually build with. UK research puts a specific number on it: 77% admit their AI initiatives are falling short.

The gap between virtual try-on demos and virtual try-on that consumers actually use has been wide for a long time. In 2025, it narrowed meaningfully. The question now is whether it closes all the way — and what retailers should be doing about it.

In May 2025, Klarna's CEO admitted they'd pushed AI-driven job cuts too far and began rehiring human agents. The story got covered as a cautionary tale. It's more useful than that — and more instructive about what actually went wrong.

Between AI Mode, agentic checkout, virtual try-on expansion, and Project Mariner, Google confirmed more commerce-relevant technology at I/O 2025 than at any developer conference in recent memory. Most coverage led with the chatbot.