Automation

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council on 24 April 2026. The agentic commerce infrastructure layer is no longer a conversation. It is a governance body.

Smart carts, autonomous checkout, computer vision for shelf intelligence, inventory robots. All have had conference moments. In early 2026, some are scaling. Some are quietly struggling to find their use case outside the pilot environment. The UK high street has a specific lens on this.

Accio Work, launched by Alibaba International on 23 March 2026, is an enterprise AI agent platform built specifically for SMEs. No-code, multi-agent, and claiming to build an online store in 30 minutes. The adoption rate is real. What it actually means for smaller UK businesses is a more interesting question.

Only 39% of Americans trust AI agents to make everyday purchases on their behalf. That sounds like a problem for agentic commerce. Look more closely and it's more interesting than that: trust is real, category-dependent, and building along a predictable path.

At NRF 2025, Salesforce used the show to trumpet its agentic retail tools. At NRF 2026, Google's CEO unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol on the main stage. The difference was the mood in the room: less launch-day excitement, more cross-examination of work in progress.

On 14 October 2025, Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI, giving US customers the ability to shop through ChatGPT. The headlines covered the integration. Five months later, the integration was gone. The real story had only just begun.

On 29 September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, the ability to buy products directly through ChatGPT, powered by Stripe and starting with Etsy and Shopify merchants. Etsy's stock jumped 16%. The interesting questions start after the headlines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reading the coverage out of New York in January 2024, one thing was clear: generative AI had stopped being a theme at retail's biggest annual gathering and had become the whole conversation.