Retail Technology Show 2026: Turning Omnichannel into Operational Advantage

At last week’s Retail Technology Show in London, the message for retail COOs was clear: omnichannel is no longer a strategy — it’s an operational capability. 

The conversation has shifted from transformation to execution. The question is no longer “can we do omnichannel?” but “can we run it efficiently, profitably, and at scale?” 

For years, the industry has talked about seamless experiences, unified commerce, and customer-centricity. Walking the show floor and listening to many of the keynote speakers, a different reality emerged: most retailers don’t have an omnichannel strategy problem — they have an execution problem. 

The omnichannel discussion surfaced a number of other secondary and tertiary areas that all have significant relevance to the broader discussion too.  

AI isn’t exciting anymore. It’s exposing gaps 

While AI (unsurprisingly) dominated the agenda, it did so in the way that few had maybe expected. The discussion wasn’t about futuristic demos or bold promises.  

It was about something far more grounded and far more confronting: why are many fulfilment decisions still suboptimal? Why is inventory accuracy still so hard to achieve? And why are many stores still overwhelmed by online demand? 

The answer is a simple one. Without AI, many retail operations simply can’t cope with the complexity they’ve created.   

Retailers that embed AI agents at a native level within their tech stack are improving margins and services. Those that don’t are falling behind faster than they expected and making up that ground is becoming increasingly difficult. 

The real battle isn’t experience — it’s orchestration 

Retailers love to talk about customer experience, the journey, the brand community. However, one of the key takeaways from RTS suggested that they might be focusing on the wrong thing. 

Customers don’t see a brand’s channels. They see whether you deliver on your promise. And right now, many don’t. We’ve all been on the end of shifting delivery dates; unnecessary split shipments; or store experiences that struggle to meet the seamless fulfilment experiences of online. 

This isn’t a front-end problem. It’s an orchestration problem. Behind every failed promise is a poor decision, the wrong node selected, incorrect inventory reserved, a mistaken priority assigned, and those decisions are (often) happening thousands of times every day. 

Stores: the solution that became the problem 

For a decade, retailers have positioned stores as the answer to the omnichannel puzzle. Ship-from-store. Click & collect. Endless aisle. 

At RTS, a more nuanced reality became apparent: stores are only an advantage if you can control them. Without the right orchestration, labour costs spike, store associates are pulled in conflicting directions, and the in-store experience deteriorates. 

As many retailers turned stores into fulfilment hubs post-pandemic, often they failed to provide them with the unified systems needed to allow them to effectively operate like one. The result? Hidden inefficiencies that quietly eroded margins. 

Accuracy is the new experience 

If there was one theme that cut through the noise, it was that customers no longer reward ambition, rather they punish inaccuracy. 

When your website says an item is available online or at a specific store location, ‘available’ needs to mean available. Similarly, ‘next day’ needs to mean next day, not the day after tomorrow, and returns need to be simple, well-communicated and work everywhere, every time. 

This is where many omnichannel strategies break down today. Not because they lack capability, but because they lack operational precision, and precision, at scale, is not humanly manageable anymore, making automation key to long-term success.  

Complexity will win unless you automate  

Retailers have spent years catering to increasingly demanding customers by adding more channels, more fulfilment options and more exacting customer promises.  

While this extra choice has been good for consumers it has led to some unforeseen consequences for retailers. Choice unfortunately means complexity and complexity compounds. 

At RTS, the most honest conversations weren’t about innovation. They were about coping. Coping with exception management, constant re-routing and margin erosion from poor decisions. 

There’s a limit to what manual processes or even rules-based systems can handle and beyond that point, there are only two realistic outcomes: automation and optimisation, or declining performance disguised as growth. 

RTS 2026 did not showcase the revolution in AI that many had anticipated. Instead, it exposed an increasingly uncomfortable reality. 

Yes, the industry has already built omnichannel, but now it has to run it properly and that means treating AI as operational infrastructure, not innovation, fixing decision-making at scale, not just adding capability, and accepting that complexity is now the core challenge. 

Right now, the gap between leaders and laggards isn’t vision, it’s execution and in modern retail, execution isn’t visible until it fails. 

The bottom line from London was a more nuanced conclusion than many might have expected at the start of the week: while the omnichannel era isn’t ending, the illusion that it has been ‘solved’ is. What comes next will be harder and the retailers that turn omnichannel complexity into operational advantage first will define the next chapter..