AI and Other Things Retailers Cared About at Shoptalk

Shoptalk 2026 had little choice when creating the theme for this year’s show: “Retail in the Age of AI.”

But what artificial intelligence actually means to the thousands of retailers and brands that will be attending the show varies significantly. Some brands and retailers care about intelligence, some about automation, while others want to improve the customer experience.

In addition to AI, our recent survey of more than 100 brands and retailers reveals that personalization, data, email/SMS, and analytics are all important topics in their own right. Although, of course, all of them intertwine with AI.

What Brands and Retailers Really Want From AI

AI was the most popular topic that brands and retailers wanted to learn more about from peers and vendors at Shoptalk. After a year of AI tests, people want to know what actually works, and how they can move from test to implementation.

In our conversations with brands and retailers, AI fell into a variety of different buckets:

• AI to get smarter: Brands and retailers are already turned on to the value of data, and are curious to know how AI can make it work harder. We heard a lot about unlocking customer insights, making it easier to target customers and improve customer experiences. We also heard from retailers and brands that measurement and analytics could be improved with AI.
• AI for time savings and automation: Nearly every part of a brand or retailer’s company can benefit from automating workflows and simplifying processes with AI. The goal of Shoptalk attendees is to find the solutions that are ready for prime time and can make the biggest improvements. Retailers mentioned wanting AI automation for marketers who had heavily manual processes as well as for engineers to make their lives easier as they built out solutions to help speed up everything from integrations to workflows between different tech partners.
• AI for content creation: With thousands or even millions of SKUs, tons of different marketing channels, content formats and add types, retailers and brands are eager to incorporate AI solutions — as long as the resulting product is high quality and brand safe. Content can’t be “set it and forget it”; it needs to fit into current content creation best practices.
• AI for site optimization and personalization: Brands and retailers are looking for smart AI that’s not just automating key elements like site search and personalization, but actually making them smarter and optimizing them over time. Agentic AI in particular was noted as having a lot of potential in creating better customer experiences and driving higher return on investment.

Yes, lots of brands and retailers wanted to learn more about AI capabilities, but there was a healthy dose of skepticism. The shiny object phase is definitely over. Many people noted that they went to the conference to suss out which solutions were actually worth the investment and where they could expect the most significant gains. There was concern in particular around AI output, specifically if LLMs could actually create quality content and if shopping agents could deliver a decent customer experience.

The Other Hot Shoptalk Topics

Brands and retailers aren’t putting all of their eggs in the AI basket. They have a lot of things to focus on, and they aren’t always AI-first (although they sometimes are). In addition to AI, here are the top areas of focus for brands and agencies:

1. Personalization and CRO Tools: Brands and retailers are focused on the experience on site, from recommendation engines to conversion optimization to on-site personalization. While some of these elements can be driven by AI, buyers are also considering what data and testing capabilities they need to do it well.
2. Data Platforms and CRM/CDP: Most brands and retailers realize that good data drives higher performance across the board, including any AI-enabled capabilities. A lot of people are looking to uplevel their CDP and get more modern, flexible customer data workflows in place, including journey orchestration, CRM and analytics.
3. Email and SMS Marketing (ESP): Email is back — although it never really went away. Brands and retailers want to bring their email and SMS technology into their overall customer experience and they want smarter automation capabilities.
4. Analytics and Attribution Reporting: Brands and agencies want to get smarter with “conversational BI” as well as attribution that connects their spend to revenue. Having a clear picture of customer value, revenue and “closed loop” measurement are key drivers for change.

Turning Dreams Into Reality

A lot of companies have older retail and marketing tech stacks, including CDPs that are hard to work with, old email platforms that aren’t that smart, and on-site optimization that can’t access real-time data. That's a reality that AI needs to work with.

Brands and retailers need to be realistic about AI as they look to upgrade. AI has the potential to deliver major improvements, but it needs to live up to quality, performance and ROI standards. Brands also need quality data to drive quality outputs, and that some automation (like chatbots) isn’t always well received by shoppers. Therefore, keeping the customer experience in mind is just as important as always.

For vendors, adding AI as fast as possible isn’t going to help buyers. Creating truly better solutions that solve actual problems might take a little longer, but brands and retailers will appreciate the smarter approach.

Jon Sherry is founder and CEO of Alium, an intelligence platform that helps buyers and sellers of marketing and e-commerce solutions make smarter decisions.