As AI-powered assistants increasingly guide shoppers from discovery to purchase, the experience itself is being reshaped. It’s faster, more conversational, and often more helpful. But it’s also increasingly removed from the retailer. Retail customer experience has always been about understanding people, be it their needs, their preferences or their intentions in the retail space. This is vital because it informs customized and authentic responses that build trust over time.

There is no question that AI is transforming the nature of customer contact. There is, however, ample debate about what that transformation will mean for the idea of the human connection. Customer contact thought leaders have long argued that AI is about augmenting rather than replacing humanity. They stress that by automating rote tasks and surfacing actionable intelligence real-time, AI enables humans to better demonstrate qualities like personalization, empathy, and resolve – and thus better cultivate meaningful relationships.

Beauty is the 3rd most popular spending category for Gen Zalpha, with 40% of young people who love to spend on beauty. Despite this desire, 29% of young consumers actively search for a discount before purchasing. How can beauty brands capture young people’s attention with value-driven messages, and successfully convert that attention into purchases?

This comprehensive study delivers both the hard numbers and the real-life qualitative insights you need to capture the youth market.

Online retail in 2026 doesn’t just look different; it operates on an entirely new frequency. We’ve left the reactive models of the early 2020s in the dust, entering an era of predictive, agentic commerce where the friction between desire and acquisition has effectively vanished. For developers and merchants, the game has changed. It’s no longer about ensuring basic functionality. It’s about achieving architectural mastery.

The most consequential customer a brand will acquire in 2026 may never read a promotional email, react to a banner ad or feel the emotional pull of a well-crafted rewards tier. It will be an artificial intelligence (AI) agent, querying product catalogs, comparing subscription value and executing purchases on behalf of a human who has already delegated the decision.

That structural shift is forcing brands across retail, payments, telecom and financial services to rethink what loyalty means when the customer is a machine. The response, increasingly, is to stop designing loyalty programs for human feelings and start engineering them for computational legibility, making brand value queryable, parseable and optimizable in real time.

As the retail market continues to change and e-commerce becomes more dominant, delivery disruptions have evolved from isolated inconveniences into signs of deeper structural issues across the supply chain.

These challenges are no longer confined to the last mile; instead, they often stem from fragmented upstream systems, inventory mismatches, and poor coordination between distribution, carriers and customer support. With more than 120 million packages stolen from U.S. porches last year and up to 15% of deliveries in urban areas failing to arrive, retailers face mounting pressure to protect margins and maintain customer trust.

We define the Store of the Future as a future-ready retail environment that leverages technology and integrates data across business functions and channels. The aim is to deliver seamless, personalized shopper experiences while simultaneously optimizing store operations and employee performance. The ultimate goal is to unlock performance through innovation.   

The four core pillars

Unified Commerce

Discover the strategies and trends shaping loyalty in 2026—and learn how to elevate your program beyond the basic earn-and-burn model. You’ll learn what gamification tactics set you apart from competitors in 2026, how rewarding eco-friendly choices drive customer loyalty and how companies are using AI in their personalization strategies.