The battle for consumer spending continues. Over the past few years, shoppers have been tightening their belts, spending less on retail shopping and more on essentials like rent and healthcare. That shift spells sobering news for retail giants Amazon and Walmart. With the overall retail pie getting smaller, the scrum for each slice is heating up.

Nothing shows this battle more clearly than the holiday season. The last three months of 2025 accounted for about 27% of all retail sales for the year. Amazon, for its part, continued to gain share from October through December, achieving record-breaking results. But the boost isn’t coming from essentials. Instead, categories like clothing and electronics are fueling its gains.

At NRF'26, Google introduced UCP for agentic commerce while Walmart unveiled agent-led shopping in Gemini. Discover what Sundar Pichai (Google, CEO) and John Furner (Walmart, President & CEO) say about what it changes for discovery, loyalty, and conversion.

Retail has lived through plenty of “next eras.” The web. Mobile. Marketplaces. Social commerce.

Each wave promised a new kind of growth, and each quietly reset customer expectations.

AI systems don’t rank logos — they surface meaning. Clear, consistent signals of trust determine whether your brand appears in AI-driven recommendations. Will your brand be visible in the age of AI? The short answer: you need a meaningful brand or you’ll be commoditized.

The longer answer starts with what a meaningful brand is outside of AI. A logo is not a brand — it’s a visual identifier that recalls promises kept, problems solved and values demonstrated. Brands exist in the minds of the public.

If you’re a retailer just gearing up for the peak holiday shopping season, you’re probably already too late. In fact, the very notion of a big selling period that’s treated as a once-a-year phenomenon is out of date, says Greg Dyer, chief commercial officer of the staffing agency Randstad USA.

“Companies need to always be thinking about peak — constantly involving all areas within the organization,” he says. That means tightly coordinating planning across manufacturing, logistics, marketing and sales on an ongoing basis.

We expect modern supply chain environments to be hyper-efficient, and a single bad barcode can set off a domino effect of disruptions like delayed shipments, failed compliance checks, internal rework, and even lost customer trust. While automation and data capture technologies continue to advance, one seemingly simple element often causes disproportionate problems: the printed barcode label. 

We conducted our 3rd annual survey of B2B eCommerce practitioners to understand how the market has changed over the past year. In this in-depth report, we uncover key trends in the changing culture of B2B companies, where companies are investing… and much more.)

Retailers are under growing pressure to automate customer interactions and deliver faster, more responsive service. Agentic artificial intelligence, a new class of AI tools that can act independently and adapt to real-time signals, offers the opportunity to improve customer experience (CX) without constant human oversight. However, many brands still operate with systems and budgets tied up in operational essentials.

Generative AI is increasingly influencing decision-making at the highest levels of business. SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced new research that reveals 44 percent of C-suite executives would override a decision they had already planned to make based on AI insights. Another 38 percent would trust AI to make business decisions on their behalf.

The “AI Has a Seat in the C-Suite” survey, conducted by Wakefield Research and sponsored by SAP, polled 300 C-Level executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue in the United States. Additional findings included: