Simon Seddon

OpenAI is taking a bidding market inside ChatGPT to 31 European countries. On its own availability table, British advertisers can already buy into it and none of those 31 can.

Sainsbury's named a head for its AI Centre of Excellence on the Wednesday, then suspended facial recognition alerts at one store on the Monday. Its defence points straight at the safeguard.

A domestic week. While the quarter argued about shopping agents, three UK retailers quietly spent it building AI into their own estates instead of renting someone else's.

A quiet week with a clear shape. Discovery has moved to the agent, but only 7% of UK shoppers think the delivery promise is being kept. The genuine developments of the week were all at the loading dock.

New Vercel and World Retail Congress research says 43% of UK shoppers would switch retailer for better on-site AI. The same data shows AI has changed how Britain finds products far more than how it buys them.

AI-generated product imagery is the AI-commerce use case with a real, measured payoff right now: SCAYLE STUDIOS cut ABOUT YOU's photo costs ~90% and lifted GMV 9.2%. But it lands the week the EU's AI-content rules bite, against Britain's deep distrust of AI in fashion, and inside an unfinished argument about models, jobs and disclosure.

Everyone spent the week building the buy-side for AI agents: a UK sandbox, fresh payment rails, an off-the-shelf assistant, a cart inside ChatGPT. Then CI&T and Morrisons showed what UK shoppers actually did with it.

AI chatbots get a fact wrong about 64% of UK high-street retailers. That, the shelf robots, and Gap's 'mindset beats mandate' study defined the week.

Britain is one of the heaviest AI-shopping markets and the most sceptical. The same week, the industry and the FCA agreed the rulebook, not the tech, is the holdup.

Two UK studies say shoppers won't hand AI the wallet. The same week, Visa proved an agent could pay and be safely accepted at both ends of the transaction.

Three UK studies say shoppers won't hand AI the wallet. The supply side spent the week laying rails anyway, and fencing Britain out.

A quiet, supply-side week: two teams rebuilding the store for agents, a beauty industry betting on trust, and Britain finally getting a tipping point.

The card networks built the agentic rails, Salesforce shipped the platform answer, and UK shoppers said the quiet part: they still don't trust it.

The UK's first agentic checkout, three consumer datasets that agree, resale's trust problem, and Kingfisher's line: technology can be bought, trust has to be earned.

The week vendor stacks, hires and procurement timetables converged. Inditex's data architect crossed to H&M, Klarna landed in ChatGPT, and AWS productised Alexa-for-Shopping.

The week the UK public sector, payments industry, fashion retailers and pure-plays all started working on the same agentic-commerce agenda.

Pichai called I/O 2026 the agentic Gemini era. The actual commerce story is more concrete: Universal Cart, the cross-surface object Google wants every retailer to integrate with, with a UK launch date conspicuously absent.

The week the agentic-commerce conversation moved from infrastructure to operational deployment, with a distinctly UK-fashion overlay.

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.

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.

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.

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.