All Articles

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.

Through 2025, every major incumbent in global payments shipped a version of the same infrastructure: tokenised rails for AI agents to complete purchases autonomously. The convergence is less a market signal than a regulatory gap being filled by private hands.

Easter 2025 was the first major UK retail season where AI-powered demand forecasting, personalised promotional timing, and AI-assisted customer service all operated at meaningful scale simultaneously. The results weren't transformative — but they were instructive.

RTS 2025 moved to ExCeL London and brought something new with it: not more AI, but better AI. More deployment stories, fewer demos, and a sharper, more honest conversation about where the value actually sits.

The EU's AI regulation is coming into force in phases. The UK hasn't followed suit — but UK retailers with EU exposure or AI vendor contracts are more implicated than the 'not our problem' reading suggests.

Pay360 2025 at ExCeL London landed one month before Mastercard's Agent Pay announcement. The payments industry already knew where it was heading. The mood was focused rather than euphoric, which felt about right.

The word 'agentic' is now applied to almost everything with a language model in it. Here's a working definition based on how the technology actually functions, and a clearer view of what's in production versus what's still mostly demos.

Schema.org Product markup and JSON-LD have been around for over a decade. In 2025, they became the infrastructure that determines whether AI systems can accurately understand and recommend your products. The SEO conversation became a GEO conversation. The stakes got real.