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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.
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.
Three UK studies say shoppers won't hand AI the wallet. The supply side spent the week laying rails anyway, and fencing Britain out.
Three generations of warehouse automation in a decade. The hardware is almost secondary now. It's the software doing the heavy lifting.
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.
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.