personalisation

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

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

LLMs are genuinely changing how recommendation engines work. UK shoppers are using AI tools in growing numbers. Most of them can't name a single experience that impressed them. That gap is the story.

After years of underwhelming chatbot experiences, AI-powered conversational commerce is finally delivering on its promise. Here's what's changed, and what the numbers actually say.

AI-powered loyalty programmes in 2026 can predict churn 60 days out, personalise incentives at the individual level, and adjust offers in real-time based on behavioural signals. Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Boots are already doing versions of this. The results are meaningful. The questions about data and consent are overdue.

True one-to-one personalisation (not segments, not 'customers like you') is in production at scale in early 2026. The infrastructure is real. The results are real. So are the questions about data, consent, and where helpful ends and uncomfortable begins.

The gap between virtual try-on demos and virtual try-on that consumers actually use has been wide for a long time. In 2025, it narrowed meaningfully. The question now is whether it closes all the way — and what retailers should be doing about it.

Between AI Mode, agentic checkout, virtual try-on expansion, and Project Mariner, Google confirmed more commerce-relevant technology at I/O 2025 than at any developer conference in recent memory. Most coverage led with the chatbot.

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.

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.