Shoptalk Europe 2025: Key Trends

First and foremost - what is Agentic AI and what makes it distinct from commonly used AI agents?

AI agents like generative AI are human prompted to achieve a specific set task and are typically given clear scripts and direction to engineer a result. I.e. if we asked ChatGPT to create this thought leadership piece. Agentic AI on the other hand is goal oriented and relatively autonomous – learning and evolving independently to analyse, adapt and then improve the quality of delivery to achieve that goal.

Capegemini [1]recently surveyed 1,100 business executives and found 50% intended to implement AI agents this year , rising to 82% within 3 years with Gartner[2] finding 80% of all customer services issues will be resolved with agentic AI and without human intervention by 2029.

For digital commerce – expect to see agentic AI revolutionise the field for analytics, cloud clean room adoption, rich customer experience and CRM.

Leona De Graft – Vice president of digital at Levi Strauss highlighted in a talk on ‘Measuring and Empowering the Cross-Channel Customer Journey’ that Levi’s consumers purchasing across multiple touchpoints, they were seeing 3x value spend vs those that only purchased from one touchpoint.

We’re a critical juncture of shifting from channel to shopper led brand planning where it is becoming evermore a burning issue for brands need to create a seamless unified experience across all touchpoints to help drive both share of wallet and brand love.

Cloud clean rooms like Amazon marketing cloud are helping to pave the way for richer insights into who, when, how and in what format shoppers browse, engage and purchase across channels. Brands should look at how to leverage these insights to create richer unified targeting.

Continuing the theme of unified commerce, there was real buzz this year around the role and impact of digital instore retail media. With new inventory appearing every day, the impact of these digital touchpoints is becoming better understood and is helping shape and inspire acquisition along the funnel.

In a recent report Emarketer[3] found that 61% of consumers have already purchased from these formats, 66% said the availability of the inventory boost their spend and 63% said their inclusion would influence the way they shop.

The role of digital in inspiring purchase decisions is well established but brands are now seeing a clear pathway from leveraging a brilliant onsite digital experience to secure both immediate conversion and then open the door to acquisition through retargeting across the landscape at a later stage

Back to the theme of AI for our final theme. It can seem that the pace of change is breathtaking with Amazon releasing a new AI functionality every week from the much vaunted Rufus, to Cosmo, to Buy for me to interests to even the brand new ‘hear the highlights’ . What is clear is that the search experience is rapidly evolving and could up-end the traditional path to purchase moving from ‘an infinite’ digital shelf to a few select AI recommended range.

Amazon is predicated on creating brilliant experiences and these solutions are designed to enhance and personalise the shopper journey to make each and every interaction more meaningful. This pursuit of experience is shifting search away from product driven keyword search to reflecting expected intent behind the search and will continue to further personalise to drive influence on wallet spend across the landscape.

The battle for attention in a crowded space is the new frontier and AI is empowering change at a pace never seen before, it’s an exciting space but brands should act now to secure their leadership in the new digital world.