Using AI to derive actionable insights from commerce data
25 articles
ONS puts UK retail AI adoption at 17%. India, Singapore and China sit at 50–59% on the equivalent IBM measure. The headline gap is real, and the story underneath it is more interesting than the headline.
This week's biggest stories in AI and commerce: Amazon's checkout-free expansion gathers pace, Shopify Magic reaches all merchants, and the EU's algorithmic pricing net draws tighter.
In January 2024, NRF was full of AI announcements and cautious optimism. In May 2026, the infrastructure is built, the first data is in, and the picture is (like most things in commerce) more complicated than the enthusiasts or the sceptics predicted. Here's my honest read.
eMarketer flagged in early 2026 that retailer pushback could cloud the year's AI progress. The pushback is real, but the reasons behind it are more specific than AI fatigue. Three structural concerns, from retailers who understand the technology well enough to see the problem.
Adobe's March 2026 data shows AI-referred traffic converting 42% better than non-AI channels. That's a record, and a number that needs careful interpretation: selection effects, early adopter behaviour, and the specific nature of AI-mediated discovery all shape what it means for your planning.
TikTok Shop's 2025 full-year US GMV came in at $15.82 billion — up 108% year-on-year. The global figure was $64.3 billion. The AI recommendation engine driving that growth isn't a feature; it's the entire product. Brands that still haven't engaged with social commerce are running out of comfortable reasons not to.
Digital Commerce 360 described early 2026 as a 'structural reckoning' for ecommerce. AI-powered shopping, agentic purchasing, tariff disruption, and zero-click search hitting simultaneously. The cumulative effect isn't incremental — it's a different operating environment. Here's how I'm thinking about it.
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.
Adobe Analytics recorded $257.8 billion in US online spending across the full 2025 holiday season. UK shoppers spent a record £26.9 billion. AI-referred traffic converted 54% better on Thanksgiving. Those are the headline numbers. The less-headline numbers are, as usual, the more interesting ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.