Shoptalk Chat: Capturing Consumer Attention in the Era of AI

Shoptalk is regarded as a one stop shop for connecting with Europe’s most senior retail, brand, tech and investor decision makers pioneering tomorrow’s digital innovations in store and online – the latest 2025 edition was no disappointment!

Talk of the town in Barcelona was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Agentic AI. We’re moving from Generative AI to Agentic AI with systems that act on behalf of the shopper, not just generate content for them. From Wayfair’s AI design assistant to Kroger’s behaviour-detecting algorithms, this next wave of automation is more predictive, more responsive and increasingly autonomous.

Six out of 10 customers (63%) expect AI-fueled technologies to become the primary mode of customer support in the years to come; compared to 21% just four years earlier. That’s a staggering increase in expectation levels, but when you consider the advance of GenAI and (more recently) Agentic AI in the last two and a half years, maybe that leap forward is not quite so surprising.

With recent developments in Agentic AI, (including our own Manhattan Agent Foundry) organisations have once again taken another dramatic leap forward in terms of customer service and engagement potential. In terms of retail, Agentic AI represents a particularly interesting proposition: offering the opportunity to improve customer experiences, deliver more effective and accurate pre/at/post-purchase brand engagement, while also maximising operational efficiency along the way.

One thing that stood out to me during conversations on the stand and on the show floor was the topic of ‘capturing the consumer’ and then holding their interest in an age of increasing branded, digital noise: it’s no easy task.

Gen  has essentially changed the rules of engagement for retail brands. Long gone is the approach where brands sought to almost ring fence their audience and engage with them on their terms, pushing offers and new product lines. Now it’s all about consumers engaging with brands on their own terms.

Continuous conversations hold the key to brand success and it’s all in the here and now, a heady mix of social commerce, live shopping and authentic influencer content, making for a constantly evolving brand narrative. For this to work though, it means back-end fulfilment operations and IT need to be capable of keeping up with developing front-end sales channels and customer expectations in real-time.

Another interesting takeaway from Barcelona was this: it almost felt like we were witnessing a generational technology handover – a passing of the torch moment if you will. The death of omnichannel as a term, replaced instead by ‘omnipresence’. A sweeping statement you might feel given the preeminence the word has enjoyed in retail circles over the last couple of decades but let me explain.

Gen Z is the first digitally native generation of shoppers – we’ve known this for a while now – but the implications of this are finally being felt across every element of the retail landscape. From selling, engaging and communicating, to ordering, payment and fulfilment, today’s retailers must be ready to touch and participate across every part of the supply chain commerce conversation in the same breath, flawlessly and in real-time, regardless of time zones, platforms or channels.

This means that they need less omnichannel capabilities and more omnipresence across supply chain, selling, engagement, fulfilment, delivery and returns. In short, back-end supply chain and IT operations need to be as fast, transparent, responsive and agile as the front-end processes consumers are using. This is where Agentic AI is perfectly suited, capturing and (then) continually engaging with the consumer across this whole process.

It was not just Agentic AI that was a hot topic of conversation though. While many were talking digital strategy, brands such as Primark are doubling down on in-store and winning. Primark doesn’t sell online in the US.

No ‘BOGOFS’. No coupons. Just a powerful combination of price, product and physical experience where the experience is the strategy has led to a thriving store-first model, showing that the physical store can be a brand’s secret weapon even in the age of Agentic AI and social commerce

Forget the naysayers: retail isn’t dying; it’s being reborn as a networked, AI-powered, omnipresent engine of connection. Shoptalk 2025 made one thing clear to me: while advances in Generative and Agentic AI are certainly bringing the vision of an autonomous, omnipresent retail future a step closer to reality, even as it does, it reminds us of the increasing importance and the value of the (changing) role human agents will continue to play as the brand-customer narrative continues to evolve.