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Salesforce, Google Cloud, and half the industry arrived at the Javits Center in January 2025 with the same word: agents. Reading through what each company actually announced, the vocabulary shift is real — but the gap between pitch and production remains considerable.

A year ago the question was whether to run pilots. Now it's what to put into production. That shift sounds small. It isn't.

UK online spend on Black Friday 2024 hit £1.12 billion — a 7.2% year-on-year increase and the strongest Black Friday since 2021. The AI traffic story was early but present. The mobile payment story was significant. And BNPL hit £117 million in a single day.

Two 2024 incidents exposed the real fault line in algorithmic pricing. It's not whether prices change — it's whether consumers know they might, and whether they're already committed when they do.

Manchester Tech Festival ran from 28 October to 8 November 2024, with the main conference at Victoria Baths and a dedicated AI Conference on 31 October at Friends Meeting House. If you want to know how the Northern tech community is genuinely engaging with AI, rather than performing enthusiasm at it, it was worth attending.

In September 2024, Answer.AI's Jeremy Howard proposed llms.txt — a standard for structuring web content so AI systems can read it more effectively. The technical case is interesting. Whether it matters for ecommerce is a more honest question.

Online fashion returns are a structural problem, not a temporary one. AI is starting to address it at multiple stages. Most of the industry conversation is focused on the wrong stage.

eCommerce Expo 2024 at ExCeL London was dominated by AI but defined by something rarer. A room full of UK retailers willing to say, publicly, that they didn't know what to do with it yet. That candour was the most useful thing about it.

Retail media networks have quietly become one of the fastest-growing advertising markets in the world. Now AI is changing how campaigns get built, targeted, and measured — and not always in ways advertisers should be comfortable with.

The term GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is starting to circulate. Ignore the jargon, but pay attention to the underlying shift: AI-powered search is changing what good product content looks like.

UK fintech investment hit £5.7bn in H1 2024, nearly three times the same period in 2023. Revolut, Monzo, and Klarna are all using AI at scale. But the practical applications are less about consumer experience and more about the unglamorous infrastructure of financial services.

Shopify's AI assistant is in gradual rollout to thousands of stores. The democratisation story is real. But what does it actually mean in practice for a small UK retailer, and where does it stop?