strategy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google AI Overviews now appear on 48% of searches, with an average zero-click rate of 83% when they do. Between 58% and 68% of all Google searches now end without a click. The organic traffic model that UK retailers have relied on for fifteen years is structurally broken. Here's how to think about that.

When the tariff announcements landed in early 2026, retailers who'd invested in AI-powered supply chain tools had a different experience than those who hadn't. The gap wasn't in the headlines. It was in the operational response time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Klarna floated on the NYSE in September 2025, raising $1.37 billion and opening 30% above its offer price. The IPO narrative was built substantially around AI as a commercial multiplier. Public markets believed enough of it. The implications for UK commerce and fintech extend well beyond Klarna's own balance sheet.

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.

Through 2025, every major incumbent in global payments shipped a version of the same infrastructure: tokenised rails for AI agents to complete purchases autonomously. The convergence is less a market signal than a regulatory gap being filled by private hands.

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.

The EU's AI regulation is coming into force in phases. The UK hasn't followed suit — but UK retailers with EU exposure or AI vendor contracts are more implicated than the 'not our problem' reading suggests.

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.

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.

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.

In September 2024, Answer.AI's Jeremy Howard proposed llms.txt — a standard for structuring web content so AI systems can read it more effectively. The technical case is interesting. Whether it matters for ecommerce is a more honest question.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Pay360 2024 brought the UK payments community to ExCeL London. AI was on the agenda — but the conversation was less about transformation and more about where AI is actually earning its keep in the plumbing of financial infrastructure. Which, it turns out, is everywhere.

When Klarna revealed its AI assistant had handled 2.3 million customer conversations in a single month, the industry took notice. The story behind the numbers is worth examining carefully.

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.