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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?

OpenAI's new model processes text, audio, and images natively in a single pass. The voice demos got all the coverage. The more interesting story for retail is narrower and more actionable.

RTS 2024 brought the UK retail technology industry together at Olympia London for two days. The AI conversation dominated — but the gap between what enterprise retailers were describing on stage and what the mid-market majority could realistically deploy was the more interesting story.

Amazon's new AI shopping assistant is imperfect and occasionally baffling. It's also probably the most commercially significant thing to happen to product discovery in years. Not because of what it does now, but because of what it implies about product content strategy.

Easter is one of the bigger seasonal retail events in the UK calendar, and one of the most technically demanding for ecommerce teams — compressed timeframes, perishable stock, and demand patterns that are both predictable and notoriously hard to get exactly right. It's a good stress test for AI planning tools.

Manchester Digital's Ecommerce Conference 2024 filled a room at No.1 Circle Square with Northern practitioners rather than vendors. The AI conversation that followed was more honest for it.

Pay360 2024 brought the UK payments community to ExCeL London. AI was on the agenda — but the conversation was less about transformation and more about where AI is actually earning its keep in the plumbing of financial infrastructure. Which, it turns out, is everywhere.