Miya Knights, Director and Publisher, Retail Technology Magazine

Pulling together what NRF 2026 revealed (across my four Retail Technology dispatches) and what the KPMG Retail Think Tank I’m a member of is flagging for the UK, I’d distil the show into five trends retailers should keep front-of-mind for 2026.

• Agentic AI becomes a customer-journey and integration race. NRF made clear that “agentic” shifts shopping from keywords and filters to conversational discovery and agent-led decisions — which means retailers must “show up” wherever those journeys happen. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) was framed as an open, compatible standard intended to make that scalable, while preserving retailer-owned customer relationships and keeping retailers as merchant of record. (Retail Technology News)

• Foundations beat pilots: “practical AI” is now about outcomes. The most credible vendor narratives were not “look at the model” but “look at the measurable impact” — with repeated emphasis that results depend on data quality, interoperability and governance. In one of the briefings, Diebold Nixdorf’s Ben Gale described the shift as “a return on intelligence” as well as ROI, while Avanade’s Ruth Harrison was explicit that AI programmes fail without trusted data and governance structures. (Retail Technology News)

• “Quiet tech” and human-centric AI become the winning experience design. LVMH’s keynote articulated what many retailers are converging on: the best AI is often invisible. Gonzague de Pirey argued technology should be “everywhere but visible nowhere,” while Soumia Hadjali framed AI as augmentation: “AI never replaces the creativity, and it amplifies it” — and applied the same principle to clienteling so advisors can, “focus on the relationship, not on the screen”. (Retail Technology News)

• Product truth and AI discoverability become strategic disciplines. The Innovations Showcase reinforced that AI-driven shopping will not scale unless retailers address long-standing weaknesses: inconsistent product data, costly integration work, fragile order operations, and decision loops that don’t reach the frontline. In other words: agentic commerce forces a return to catalogue completeness, structured attributes, inventory truth and orchestration. (Retail Technology News)

• Value gets redefined as relevance, not just price — and it needs real-time execution. The UK backdrop is one of stagnant growth: the RTT forecasts like-for-like sales growth of 1% at best in Q1 2026, with food at 2–2.5% and non-food flat or declining. It also warns that “value” is about price, quality, and relevance, and that “promotion fatigue” means retailers need more personalised, real-time triggers. Add the “growing threat” from pre-loved and Chinese ecommerce platforms, and the mandate becomes clear: optimise relentlessly while sharpening propositions. (KPMG)