Callum and Dan from our Enterprise Sales team headed to eTail UK in Manchester for two days of retail conversations, AI discussions and a fair amount of networking.
The agenda covered a lot, from agentic commerce and predictive personalisation to AI-ready team design. But across the talks and conversations, one theme kept coming through clearly:
AI is not just a future retail idea anymore. It is already changing how retailers think about discovery, conversion, customer experience and internal efficiency.
One of the standout talks was Linda Cereda’s keynote, The Beauty and the Bots: Winning with Algorithms While Still Being Loved by Humans.
The session explored how agentic AI could reduce friction across the path to purchase by helping customers discover, compare and buy products through more natural interactions.
In plain English, that means customers may not always browse in the way they do now. They may start asking AI tools for help, comparing products in conversational environments, or buying through platforms that sit outside a retailer’s own website.
That creates a big opportunity, but also a clear challenge.
If discovery starts moving away from traditional search and navigation, retailers need to make sure their products are still visible, understandable and represented properly in those environments.
For Shoptimised, that is where product data becomes even more important.
AI-led discovery still depends on clear information. If a product title is vague, attributes are missing, categories are weak or key details are inconsistent, AI systems have less to work with when deciding what to show, recommend or compare.
The takeaway from the session was not that AI should become the face of every retail experience but that AI should work in the background to remove friction, improve speed, support accessibility and help customers get to the right product more easily.
Another key session focused on predictive personalisation, with speakers including Stephen Dewar from Blackcircles and James Bell from La Redoute.
The discussion looked at how AI can help retailers anticipate what customers need, trigger more relevant experiences, and improve conversion and lifetime value.
That sounds exciting, but it also comes back to a very practical point: personalisation is only as good as the data behind it.
Retailers can combine CRM, transactional and behavioural data to create more relevant content and offers, but the quality of that output depends on how well that data is structured, connected and understood.
There was also an important point around privacy.
Consumers are becoming more conscious of how their data is used, especially in the UK. That means retailers need to find the balance between relevance and trust. Personalisation should feel helpful, not intrusive.
For product discovery, the same principle applies.
If AI is going to help customers find the right products faster, it needs accurate, structured and commercially useful product data. Retailers cannot rely on AI to magically interpret messy inputs.
Better inputs still create better outputs.
That is true in Google Shopping.
It is true in Performance Max.
And it will continue to be true as AI plays a bigger role in how customers discover and compare products.
The third standout session focused on AI-ready team design, featuring Stephen Dewar from Blackcircles and Paul Morris from RS Group.
This was less about customer-facing AI and more about how eCommerce and digital teams need to evolve internally.
A useful point from the panel was that the conversation should not be framed as humans versus AI but how teams can combine human judgement with AI tools to work more effectively.
In eCommerce, retailers need analytical skills, but they also need creative thinking. They need people who can test new tools, but also people who can sense-check outputs and understand whether they make sense for the brand and customer.
The same applies to feed optimisation.
AI can support analysis, speed up processes, reduce repetitive work and help teams make sense of large amounts of information. But it still needs people who understand the business, the customer, the product range and the commercial context.
One of Callum and Dan’s biggest takeaways from eTail was that there are still several schools of thought around AI, conversational commerce and how retailers should prepare.
There is no single route everyone is following.
Some brands are thinking about agentic commerce and native checkout. Others are focused on predictive personalisation. Others are still working out how AI can support their internal teams without disrupting the rest of the business.
That uncertainty is normal.
The important thing is to start testing in a way that is practical, measurable and useful. Retailers do not need to overhaul everything at once, but they do need to understand where AI could affect visibility, discovery and customer expectations.
That starts with asking the right questions.
Are your products easy to understand?
Is the information clear?
Can platforms see the difference between similar products?
Are key details like fit, compatibility, sizing, material and product relationships easy to read?
Those questions are becoming more important as shopping experiences become more conversational.
Of course, eTail was not just about the sessions.
Callum and Dan spent much of the event speaking with retailers and eCommerce teams in the main hall, during networking breaks and in one-to-one meetings.
Some of the most useful conversations were the informal ones. Quick chats over breakfast. Questions between sessions. Honest conversations about what teams are testing, where they are seeing progress, and where they still feel unsure.
Those moments matter because they show what retailers are really thinking about, not just what gets covered on stage.
For Shoptimised, the connection is clear.
Whether customers are discovering products through Google Shopping, Performance Max, AI-led search or conversational commerce, platforms need strong product data to understand what is being sold and when it should be shown.
For a long time, product feeds helped answer a simple question:
What is this product?
Now, AI-led shopping experiences are starting to ask something more specific:
Is this the right product for this shopper’s question?
That might include questions around fit, compatibility, sizing, assembly, product differences, accessories or how one variant compares to another.
This is where feed quality becomes even more important.
Titles, descriptions, attributes, product types and performance signals are not becoming less relevant. They are becoming part of a wider product context that AI systems need to understand.
That is also why Shoptimised now supports conversational attributes in the platform.
These attributes allow retailers to add richer product context into their feed, including information such as question and answer content, document links, related products, item group titles, variant options and popularity ranking.
A lot of this information already exists somewhere in the business. It might be on product pages, in FAQs, in manuals, in size guides, in variant fields or in product relationships.
The opportunity is to turn that information into structured feed data that platforms can use.
The future of shopping may become more conversational, but the foundation is still the same.
Better product data creates better product understanding.
eTail UK Manchester made one thing clear: AI is no longer sitting on the edge of the retail conversation.
It is now part of how retailers are thinking about customer experience, product discovery, personalisation, team structure and commercial growth.
But the brands that make the most progress will not be the ones that chase every new AI idea at once. They will be the ones that test carefully, strengthen their data foundations, and use AI where it genuinely improves the experience.
A big thank you to everyone Callum and Dan spoke to across the two days.
Plenty of good conversations, plenty to think about, and a clear reminder that the next stage of eCommerce will still depend on making products easier to find, understand and buy.
Speak to the Shoptimised team about improving your product feed, strengthening your product data, and building a clearer foundation for Google Shopping, Performance Max and AI-led discovery.
