of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
Shoptalk Spring 2026 was the most AI-saturated edition in the event's history. And yet, it kept arriving at the same place, with the same hallway conversations, over and over: the human.
The event’s theme was “Retail in the Age of AI.” In side conversations, press briefings, and even on stages, event leadership told a tightly crafted narrative about how and why this theme came to be: while AI was the most obvious topic of interest, the framing and the tagline’s word choice told a much bigger story.
“The wording of it is very specific…because AI is serving as the backdrop for everything happening today, whether that is in how it's powering your site and personalization, or it's serving as a backdrop for why in-person connections are even more important today,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Global President of Connected Commerce at Hyve, during a press briefing at the show. “When you see the number of people here, and you see the energy, it's very clear that those human interactions are really important.”
In the age of AI, humanity feels like a scarcity. Efficiency and output are prioritized over the time, intention, and care put into tasks. But if the sessions, formats, and experiences of Shoptalk Spring showed us anything, it's that humanity re-enters the equation through one critical lever: trust.
Thousands of executives came to Shoptalk to reach the top of their own hierarchy of needs. They sought self-actualization through C-suite fireside chats and keynotes, looking for a playbook they could deploy (ahem, rinse and repeat) amid rapid technological change. But what they needed, and what the sessions kept exposing, was an unfinished foundation: the need for safety and security, a sense of belonging, and the self-respect and confidence that come from being trusted with the tools to do your best work. The industry was reaching for the penthouse. The pyramid doesn't negotiate.
Last December, Future Commerce predicted that 2026 would be "the year that consumers and companies shift from relying on institutions to relying on themselves." Three months later, Shoptalk confirmed it scene by scene. The consumer who uses ChatGPT to perfect her skincare regimen and still checks the brand's site anyway. The tech executive who builds his own app in Cursor because marketing takes too long. The brand that earns credibility from already-passionate consumers instead of borrowing it from institutions. Trust and autonomy are two sides of the same coin, and where you find both, you find fulfillment.
What’s Actually Changing Consumers’ Trust in Brands
Consumers’ trust in brands and in AI is now intertwined, with one always influencing the other. Word of mouth is still the most powerful lever brands can pull. Our Word of Mouth Index has consistently shown that positive word of mouth is the strongest indicator of brand value and growth. But WOM isn’t just traveling from person to person anymore; it’s flowing fluidly between creators, communities, and AI engines. Leading brands are building for it and creating authentic brand love and belonging in the process, while others are deploying AI into a trust vacuum and wondering why it isn't converting.
Jessica Alba has built The Honest Company on community, not on her celebrity or even on a specific product innovation. She shared how, before “creator economy” was even a phrase, she spent years building relationships and forming a multi-tier creator model that now includes:
- Tier 1: Voices like hers that have broad reach and high credibility
- Tier 2: Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who share similar, authentic stories about parenting and all its unexpected scenarios
- Tier 3: Everyday consumers with small friend and family networks, who are rewarded with free products to share their stories
Now, creator briefs exist solely for legal purposes. Beyond the core “fine print” and three overarching talking points, creators have full creative control. "The more honest and messy, the better," Alba said. In fact, she noted that some of the brand’s most effective content featured creators showing the “messiness,” whether it was a dirty sink, a chaotic laundry room, or a dirty living room. Powerful parenting content shows real-life proof and empathy, not luxury aspiration.
"I think all of the scripted and unscripted content is going to be brand-driven,” Alba said. “When you can collapse the funnel, when the brand has that direct relationship with the creator, you get much richer storytelling."
Digitizing the Civic Square
Trust is the core architecture of The Honest Company’s content doctrine, which is especially profound at a time when most creators lean into hyper-curated feeds, and AI creates this perfection at scale. YouTube has become an especially valuable channel for delivering this authentic content to the masses: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are consumed on the platform daily. It’s why YouTube’s Travis Katz said 78% of Gen Z consumers prefer creator-led content over traditional studio content, and why creator-led videos convert at approximately 30% higher rates than brand-produced ads.
The desire for authenticity and trust is also why Reddit has become one of the most-referred platforms on ChatGPT and other AI engines. The “civic square” of commerce has migrated online, and Reddit is where people go to share their most authentic feelings and get honest recommendations. Because of the anonymity of the platform, there is no pressure to perform and people are “free to share what they actually believe.”
"You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” Huffman said. Trust is formed through real experiences and opinions, and now that 40% of Reddit conversations have a purchase-decision component, Reddit is an influential lever merchants can pull not just to build trust but to amplify it through AI platforms.
The Conversion Disconnect
AI platforms were featured as the new sources of product discovery, comparison, and validation during Shoptalk Spring. Conversations about its power as a purchasing tool, however, were cagey at best. We’ve found in our research that after consumers receive an AI recommendation, they want to visit the brand's site to conduct their own research and eventually make a purchase.
One speaker cited data from eMarketer, which predicted that 8.8% of eCommerce will be agentic. Others shared insights from Merkle, which said 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, and another 10-25% of eCommerce sales will be entirely autonomous. In their closing panel, Shoptalk’s Joe Laszlo and Ben Miller shared the belief that true agentic commerce, where bots buy things on your behalf, is overhyped for now. AI-driven services, like Pearl Planner from David’s Bridal, which offer true process automation and personalized support by helping women navigate more than 300 decisions over 18 months, are very real and offer very real value. Brands are nurturing trust by empowering consumers to act as their own advocates.
Consumer behavior data from Home Depot’s Magic Apron also painted a very real picture of consumers’ trust in AI. “Customers want to be helped, and they want to be helped in the right moment by the right tool,” said Jason Broggi, EVP of Customer Experience and President of Online, The Home Depot. “If that’s a human or a chatbot, it’s really about can I be helpful in the moment?” One of consumers’ favorite use cases on the retailer’s eCommerce site is quickly distilling complex information from different sources to find an answer to a very specific question, such as, “Is this faucet compatible with that valve?” Technically, they could spend a few hours reading through PDPs and scrolling through hundreds of reviews, or they could save hours by using Magic Apron. This is where context, objectivity, and seamlessness come together to build trust.
How Wide is the Employee Trust Gap?
The majority of discussions centered around consumers’ use of AI, and how it will ultimately impact when, why, and how they engage with brands. The real leaders of the show broadened the discussion to touch on what is happening to the people inside these institutions as AI changes the nature of their work and how they measure success. The Home Depot, Macy’s, and Stitch Fix were among the small subset of brands that shared tangible examples of how they use AI as a tool to validate, enrich, and expand employee expertise, while bringing them into the development cycle for future tech innovation. Safety and empowerment drive employee adoption and autonomy, while building trust in leadership.
We predicted that 2026 would be the year of self-sovereign brands, but this can only come to fruition with a cycle of trust. The C-suite must trust employees with the tools to do their best work, and employees must trust leadership to give them the training, upskilling, and support they need. Sessions showed that most brands don’t have a tangible playbook for success, but they do have guidance to help others feel secure in their insecurity so they can effectively test, fail, and learn.
Stitch Fix has built a business on its rich arsenal of first-party data and the expertise of its stylists. Now, the brand is augmenting the two with various AI-powered tools, such as a Style Assistant and visualization experience. The tech helps streamline data collection (Stitch Fix Vision) and turn customer queries into more technical verbiage (Style Assistant). But the real magic happens when stylists are brought into the fold to either validate a bot’s direction or add more context and support to conversations. Although the AI provides Stitch Fix stylists with the data and visuals they need to do their jobs well stylists remain a source of support for both consumers and the AI; they are not displaced.
Macy’s has launched a stylist bot (Ask Macy’s) that creates a similar experience, but the leadership team brought its employees into the fold before the tool went to market, reaffirming their importance in fulfilling the brand promise. “Our store employees know our customers better than anybody else,” said Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni. That’s why leadership had employees walked through different scenarios and call out areas that lacked context, felt pushy, or needed more finesse. With so much historical context about who the Macy’s shopper is and what they really want, employees provided the much-needed guidance leadership needed to fine-tune the tool. At the same time, leadership was able to send a loud message to them that they had the core IP (service knowledge and brand passion) that AI needed to be successful.
These moments of empowerment are happening in organizations of all sizes and across functions. In one side conversation, a tech executive noted that he was using Cursor to build his own apps so he didn’t have to wait for IT or marketing. Armed with the tech, passion, and will to learn, he can move when inspiration and opportunity strike. This is how self-sovereignty becomes business value. The caveat is that leadership teams must invest in training and enablement to help their people get there, and employees must believe that leadership has the vision to operate in their best interest. Sarah Engel of January Digital cited Brookings data that 86% of workers facing high AI displacement risk and low ability to adapt are women. The panel moved on, but the stat was a hidden headline that showed many hard conversations about AI’s influence still need to be had.
The Power of Not Knowing
Earlier this year, we declared that the problem with most industry events is that they are no longer forums for socratic debate. Instead, they are platforms for amplifying PR messaging and promoting new tech partnerships.
Several changes in the Shoptalk experience conveyed a vibe shift. Fewer sessions were tucked away in ballrooms, speakers sat in the same space as the expo hall, and more content focused on tactical guidance, deep dives, and, yes, debates. The team’s expansion of Retail Rumble allowed experts to wax poetic about the industry’s most ambiguous topics. Discussions felt more honest, with more leaders leaning into the uncertainty.
"Ego is out," Engel observed during the closing session. “People are more open about the challenges they’re having, and I have not seen that happen since April or May of 2020.” That's either a sign of genuine humility or an acknowledgment that the stakes are too high to stop posturing. And most times, the answer is found outside of the board room and in conversations with employees, tech partners, and customers. In many cases, it requires simply moving (and falling) to find the answer.
"I think a mistake a lot of companies are making is they're almost being too tentative–meaning they're observing [AI], but they're not trying to figure out how to use it,” said Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah. “And I think only by trying to use it, you then see what works, what doesn't work. This technology, and the quality of the models, is just moving so quickly. Our view is you need to lean in now. And honestly, you could try something, and you can say it's not quite good enough yet, but that probably won't be true in three or six months."
If Merkle is right and 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, that means 25% of brands’ most critical, trust-building moments will start on un-owned platforms owned by Google, OpenAI, and others. Meaningful collaboration with these platforms requires shared trust. Arguably, it’s the key to survival.
Retail leaders must trust their people to act accordingly, which entails hiring the right people and training them to act in the best interest of themselves, their brands, and their customers. Victoria’s Secret & Co CEO Hillary Super called her ability to listen and observe a “superpower.” Early in her tenure, she hired “culture carriers” who she knew understood the vision, had the skill set to carry the vision, and the desire to act without direct order-taking. This intersection between institutional loyalty, a self-starter mentality, and an appetite for change is how real transformation happens. And Super trusts her people to act, learn, and adapt accordingly.
A Matter of Trust
On the surface, "Retail in the Age of AI" was Shoptalk's creative response to an evolving discourse: the industry's buzziest topic was moving from hype to reality. As Shoptalk's Laszlo noted, now that the hype cycle has slowed, there are more tangible learnings, more meaningful advice, and more honest conversations about what is still unknown.
The tagline expresses a more profound takeaway. In the age of AI, the dynamics of retail experience and operations are changing, and trust is being generated and optimized in completely new ways.
Executives who came to Shoptalk were looking for self-actualization: the playbook that would drive a headline-carrying transformation story. But what they got, session after session, was a reminder that you can't skip levels. The safety layer, employees who feel secure, communities that feel heard, and consumers who feel known have to be built before anything above it can be structurally sound. Three days of programming on the future of agentic commerce kept coming back to the same basic question: Have you earned the trust of the people this technology is supposed to serve? Have you yourself used these technologies and found value in them?
You cannot optimize your way to trust, and you cannot agent-commerce your way to belonging.
The brands that proved this at Shoptalk weren't the ones with the most advanced AI. Creators are the new trust layer because they have real experiences and real relationships. Communities like Reddit are foundational to AI because they're made of real opinions. Employees who've spent 40+ years at one company hold something no LLM model can replicate. C-suite leaders who listen more than they declare and pontificate can see around corners the strategy decks don't cover.
If the AI era is promising efficiency, automation, and autonomy, then it’s effectively promising the executive some relief. But in reality, it is delivering expansion. The more capable the tools, the more work that gets done. Maslow’s pyramid promised that once your lower needs were secured, you could ascend. When you hand your labor over to the machine, though, you don’t ascend faster; you find a new floor.
Shoptalk Spring 2026 was the most AI-saturated edition in the event's history. And yet, it kept arriving at the same place, with the same hallway conversations, over and over: the human.
The event’s theme was “Retail in the Age of AI.” In side conversations, press briefings, and even on stages, event leadership told a tightly crafted narrative about how and why this theme came to be: while AI was the most obvious topic of interest, the framing and the tagline’s word choice told a much bigger story.
“The wording of it is very specific…because AI is serving as the backdrop for everything happening today, whether that is in how it's powering your site and personalization, or it's serving as a backdrop for why in-person connections are even more important today,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Global President of Connected Commerce at Hyve, during a press briefing at the show. “When you see the number of people here, and you see the energy, it's very clear that those human interactions are really important.”
In the age of AI, humanity feels like a scarcity. Efficiency and output are prioritized over the time, intention, and care put into tasks. But if the sessions, formats, and experiences of Shoptalk Spring showed us anything, it's that humanity re-enters the equation through one critical lever: trust.
Thousands of executives came to Shoptalk to reach the top of their own hierarchy of needs. They sought self-actualization through C-suite fireside chats and keynotes, looking for a playbook they could deploy (ahem, rinse and repeat) amid rapid technological change. But what they needed, and what the sessions kept exposing, was an unfinished foundation: the need for safety and security, a sense of belonging, and the self-respect and confidence that come from being trusted with the tools to do your best work. The industry was reaching for the penthouse. The pyramid doesn't negotiate.
Last December, Future Commerce predicted that 2026 would be "the year that consumers and companies shift from relying on institutions to relying on themselves." Three months later, Shoptalk confirmed it scene by scene. The consumer who uses ChatGPT to perfect her skincare regimen and still checks the brand's site anyway. The tech executive who builds his own app in Cursor because marketing takes too long. The brand that earns credibility from already-passionate consumers instead of borrowing it from institutions. Trust and autonomy are two sides of the same coin, and where you find both, you find fulfillment.
What’s Actually Changing Consumers’ Trust in Brands
Consumers’ trust in brands and in AI is now intertwined, with one always influencing the other. Word of mouth is still the most powerful lever brands can pull. Our Word of Mouth Index has consistently shown that positive word of mouth is the strongest indicator of brand value and growth. But WOM isn’t just traveling from person to person anymore; it’s flowing fluidly between creators, communities, and AI engines. Leading brands are building for it and creating authentic brand love and belonging in the process, while others are deploying AI into a trust vacuum and wondering why it isn't converting.
Jessica Alba has built The Honest Company on community, not on her celebrity or even on a specific product innovation. She shared how, before “creator economy” was even a phrase, she spent years building relationships and forming a multi-tier creator model that now includes:
- Tier 1: Voices like hers that have broad reach and high credibility
- Tier 2: Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who share similar, authentic stories about parenting and all its unexpected scenarios
- Tier 3: Everyday consumers with small friend and family networks, who are rewarded with free products to share their stories
Now, creator briefs exist solely for legal purposes. Beyond the core “fine print” and three overarching talking points, creators have full creative control. "The more honest and messy, the better," Alba said. In fact, she noted that some of the brand’s most effective content featured creators showing the “messiness,” whether it was a dirty sink, a chaotic laundry room, or a dirty living room. Powerful parenting content shows real-life proof and empathy, not luxury aspiration.
"I think all of the scripted and unscripted content is going to be brand-driven,” Alba said. “When you can collapse the funnel, when the brand has that direct relationship with the creator, you get much richer storytelling."
Digitizing the Civic Square
Trust is the core architecture of The Honest Company’s content doctrine, which is especially profound at a time when most creators lean into hyper-curated feeds, and AI creates this perfection at scale. YouTube has become an especially valuable channel for delivering this authentic content to the masses: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are consumed on the platform daily. It’s why YouTube’s Travis Katz said 78% of Gen Z consumers prefer creator-led content over traditional studio content, and why creator-led videos convert at approximately 30% higher rates than brand-produced ads.
The desire for authenticity and trust is also why Reddit has become one of the most-referred platforms on ChatGPT and other AI engines. The “civic square” of commerce has migrated online, and Reddit is where people go to share their most authentic feelings and get honest recommendations. Because of the anonymity of the platform, there is no pressure to perform and people are “free to share what they actually believe.”
"You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” Huffman said. Trust is formed through real experiences and opinions, and now that 40% of Reddit conversations have a purchase-decision component, Reddit is an influential lever merchants can pull not just to build trust but to amplify it through AI platforms.
The Conversion Disconnect
AI platforms were featured as the new sources of product discovery, comparison, and validation during Shoptalk Spring. Conversations about its power as a purchasing tool, however, were cagey at best. We’ve found in our research that after consumers receive an AI recommendation, they want to visit the brand's site to conduct their own research and eventually make a purchase.
One speaker cited data from eMarketer, which predicted that 8.8% of eCommerce will be agentic. Others shared insights from Merkle, which said 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, and another 10-25% of eCommerce sales will be entirely autonomous. In their closing panel, Shoptalk’s Joe Laszlo and Ben Miller shared the belief that true agentic commerce, where bots buy things on your behalf, is overhyped for now. AI-driven services, like Pearl Planner from David’s Bridal, which offer true process automation and personalized support by helping women navigate more than 300 decisions over 18 months, are very real and offer very real value. Brands are nurturing trust by empowering consumers to act as their own advocates.
Consumer behavior data from Home Depot’s Magic Apron also painted a very real picture of consumers’ trust in AI. “Customers want to be helped, and they want to be helped in the right moment by the right tool,” said Jason Broggi, EVP of Customer Experience and President of Online, The Home Depot. “If that’s a human or a chatbot, it’s really about can I be helpful in the moment?” One of consumers’ favorite use cases on the retailer’s eCommerce site is quickly distilling complex information from different sources to find an answer to a very specific question, such as, “Is this faucet compatible with that valve?” Technically, they could spend a few hours reading through PDPs and scrolling through hundreds of reviews, or they could save hours by using Magic Apron. This is where context, objectivity, and seamlessness come together to build trust.
How Wide is the Employee Trust Gap?
The majority of discussions centered around consumers’ use of AI, and how it will ultimately impact when, why, and how they engage with brands. The real leaders of the show broadened the discussion to touch on what is happening to the people inside these institutions as AI changes the nature of their work and how they measure success. The Home Depot, Macy’s, and Stitch Fix were among the small subset of brands that shared tangible examples of how they use AI as a tool to validate, enrich, and expand employee expertise, while bringing them into the development cycle for future tech innovation. Safety and empowerment drive employee adoption and autonomy, while building trust in leadership.
We predicted that 2026 would be the year of self-sovereign brands, but this can only come to fruition with a cycle of trust. The C-suite must trust employees with the tools to do their best work, and employees must trust leadership to give them the training, upskilling, and support they need. Sessions showed that most brands don’t have a tangible playbook for success, but they do have guidance to help others feel secure in their insecurity so they can effectively test, fail, and learn.
Stitch Fix has built a business on its rich arsenal of first-party data and the expertise of its stylists. Now, the brand is augmenting the two with various AI-powered tools, such as a Style Assistant and visualization experience. The tech helps streamline data collection (Stitch Fix Vision) and turn customer queries into more technical verbiage (Style Assistant). But the real magic happens when stylists are brought into the fold to either validate a bot’s direction or add more context and support to conversations. Although the AI provides Stitch Fix stylists with the data and visuals they need to do their jobs well stylists remain a source of support for both consumers and the AI; they are not displaced.
Macy’s has launched a stylist bot (Ask Macy’s) that creates a similar experience, but the leadership team brought its employees into the fold before the tool went to market, reaffirming their importance in fulfilling the brand promise. “Our store employees know our customers better than anybody else,” said Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni. That’s why leadership had employees walked through different scenarios and call out areas that lacked context, felt pushy, or needed more finesse. With so much historical context about who the Macy’s shopper is and what they really want, employees provided the much-needed guidance leadership needed to fine-tune the tool. At the same time, leadership was able to send a loud message to them that they had the core IP (service knowledge and brand passion) that AI needed to be successful.
These moments of empowerment are happening in organizations of all sizes and across functions. In one side conversation, a tech executive noted that he was using Cursor to build his own apps so he didn’t have to wait for IT or marketing. Armed with the tech, passion, and will to learn, he can move when inspiration and opportunity strike. This is how self-sovereignty becomes business value. The caveat is that leadership teams must invest in training and enablement to help their people get there, and employees must believe that leadership has the vision to operate in their best interest. Sarah Engel of January Digital cited Brookings data that 86% of workers facing high AI displacement risk and low ability to adapt are women. The panel moved on, but the stat was a hidden headline that showed many hard conversations about AI’s influence still need to be had.
The Power of Not Knowing
Earlier this year, we declared that the problem with most industry events is that they are no longer forums for socratic debate. Instead, they are platforms for amplifying PR messaging and promoting new tech partnerships.
Several changes in the Shoptalk experience conveyed a vibe shift. Fewer sessions were tucked away in ballrooms, speakers sat in the same space as the expo hall, and more content focused on tactical guidance, deep dives, and, yes, debates. The team’s expansion of Retail Rumble allowed experts to wax poetic about the industry’s most ambiguous topics. Discussions felt more honest, with more leaders leaning into the uncertainty.
"Ego is out," Engel observed during the closing session. “People are more open about the challenges they’re having, and I have not seen that happen since April or May of 2020.” That's either a sign of genuine humility or an acknowledgment that the stakes are too high to stop posturing. And most times, the answer is found outside of the board room and in conversations with employees, tech partners, and customers. In many cases, it requires simply moving (and falling) to find the answer.
"I think a mistake a lot of companies are making is they're almost being too tentative–meaning they're observing [AI], but they're not trying to figure out how to use it,” said Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah. “And I think only by trying to use it, you then see what works, what doesn't work. This technology, and the quality of the models, is just moving so quickly. Our view is you need to lean in now. And honestly, you could try something, and you can say it's not quite good enough yet, but that probably won't be true in three or six months."
If Merkle is right and 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, that means 25% of brands’ most critical, trust-building moments will start on un-owned platforms owned by Google, OpenAI, and others. Meaningful collaboration with these platforms requires shared trust. Arguably, it’s the key to survival.
Retail leaders must trust their people to act accordingly, which entails hiring the right people and training them to act in the best interest of themselves, their brands, and their customers. Victoria’s Secret & Co CEO Hillary Super called her ability to listen and observe a “superpower.” Early in her tenure, she hired “culture carriers” who she knew understood the vision, had the skill set to carry the vision, and the desire to act without direct order-taking. This intersection between institutional loyalty, a self-starter mentality, and an appetite for change is how real transformation happens. And Super trusts her people to act, learn, and adapt accordingly.
A Matter of Trust
On the surface, "Retail in the Age of AI" was Shoptalk's creative response to an evolving discourse: the industry's buzziest topic was moving from hype to reality. As Shoptalk's Laszlo noted, now that the hype cycle has slowed, there are more tangible learnings, more meaningful advice, and more honest conversations about what is still unknown.
The tagline expresses a more profound takeaway. In the age of AI, the dynamics of retail experience and operations are changing, and trust is being generated and optimized in completely new ways.
Executives who came to Shoptalk were looking for self-actualization: the playbook that would drive a headline-carrying transformation story. But what they got, session after session, was a reminder that you can't skip levels. The safety layer, employees who feel secure, communities that feel heard, and consumers who feel known have to be built before anything above it can be structurally sound. Three days of programming on the future of agentic commerce kept coming back to the same basic question: Have you earned the trust of the people this technology is supposed to serve? Have you yourself used these technologies and found value in them?
You cannot optimize your way to trust, and you cannot agent-commerce your way to belonging.
The brands that proved this at Shoptalk weren't the ones with the most advanced AI. Creators are the new trust layer because they have real experiences and real relationships. Communities like Reddit are foundational to AI because they're made of real opinions. Employees who've spent 40+ years at one company hold something no LLM model can replicate. C-suite leaders who listen more than they declare and pontificate can see around corners the strategy decks don't cover.
If the AI era is promising efficiency, automation, and autonomy, then it’s effectively promising the executive some relief. But in reality, it is delivering expansion. The more capable the tools, the more work that gets done. Maslow’s pyramid promised that once your lower needs were secured, you could ascend. When you hand your labor over to the machine, though, you don’t ascend faster; you find a new floor.
Shoptalk Spring 2026 was the most AI-saturated edition in the event's history. And yet, it kept arriving at the same place, with the same hallway conversations, over and over: the human.
The event’s theme was “Retail in the Age of AI.” In side conversations, press briefings, and even on stages, event leadership told a tightly crafted narrative about how and why this theme came to be: while AI was the most obvious topic of interest, the framing and the tagline’s word choice told a much bigger story.
“The wording of it is very specific…because AI is serving as the backdrop for everything happening today, whether that is in how it's powering your site and personalization, or it's serving as a backdrop for why in-person connections are even more important today,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Global President of Connected Commerce at Hyve, during a press briefing at the show. “When you see the number of people here, and you see the energy, it's very clear that those human interactions are really important.”
In the age of AI, humanity feels like a scarcity. Efficiency and output are prioritized over the time, intention, and care put into tasks. But if the sessions, formats, and experiences of Shoptalk Spring showed us anything, it's that humanity re-enters the equation through one critical lever: trust.
Thousands of executives came to Shoptalk to reach the top of their own hierarchy of needs. They sought self-actualization through C-suite fireside chats and keynotes, looking for a playbook they could deploy (ahem, rinse and repeat) amid rapid technological change. But what they needed, and what the sessions kept exposing, was an unfinished foundation: the need for safety and security, a sense of belonging, and the self-respect and confidence that come from being trusted with the tools to do your best work. The industry was reaching for the penthouse. The pyramid doesn't negotiate.
Last December, Future Commerce predicted that 2026 would be "the year that consumers and companies shift from relying on institutions to relying on themselves." Three months later, Shoptalk confirmed it scene by scene. The consumer who uses ChatGPT to perfect her skincare regimen and still checks the brand's site anyway. The tech executive who builds his own app in Cursor because marketing takes too long. The brand that earns credibility from already-passionate consumers instead of borrowing it from institutions. Trust and autonomy are two sides of the same coin, and where you find both, you find fulfillment.
What’s Actually Changing Consumers’ Trust in Brands
Consumers’ trust in brands and in AI is now intertwined, with one always influencing the other. Word of mouth is still the most powerful lever brands can pull. Our Word of Mouth Index has consistently shown that positive word of mouth is the strongest indicator of brand value and growth. But WOM isn’t just traveling from person to person anymore; it’s flowing fluidly between creators, communities, and AI engines. Leading brands are building for it and creating authentic brand love and belonging in the process, while others are deploying AI into a trust vacuum and wondering why it isn't converting.
Jessica Alba has built The Honest Company on community, not on her celebrity or even on a specific product innovation. She shared how, before “creator economy” was even a phrase, she spent years building relationships and forming a multi-tier creator model that now includes:
- Tier 1: Voices like hers that have broad reach and high credibility
- Tier 2: Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who share similar, authentic stories about parenting and all its unexpected scenarios
- Tier 3: Everyday consumers with small friend and family networks, who are rewarded with free products to share their stories
Now, creator briefs exist solely for legal purposes. Beyond the core “fine print” and three overarching talking points, creators have full creative control. "The more honest and messy, the better," Alba said. In fact, she noted that some of the brand’s most effective content featured creators showing the “messiness,” whether it was a dirty sink, a chaotic laundry room, or a dirty living room. Powerful parenting content shows real-life proof and empathy, not luxury aspiration.
"I think all of the scripted and unscripted content is going to be brand-driven,” Alba said. “When you can collapse the funnel, when the brand has that direct relationship with the creator, you get much richer storytelling."
Digitizing the Civic Square
Trust is the core architecture of The Honest Company’s content doctrine, which is especially profound at a time when most creators lean into hyper-curated feeds, and AI creates this perfection at scale. YouTube has become an especially valuable channel for delivering this authentic content to the masses: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are consumed on the platform daily. It’s why YouTube’s Travis Katz said 78% of Gen Z consumers prefer creator-led content over traditional studio content, and why creator-led videos convert at approximately 30% higher rates than brand-produced ads.
The desire for authenticity and trust is also why Reddit has become one of the most-referred platforms on ChatGPT and other AI engines. The “civic square” of commerce has migrated online, and Reddit is where people go to share their most authentic feelings and get honest recommendations. Because of the anonymity of the platform, there is no pressure to perform and people are “free to share what they actually believe.”
"You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” Huffman said. Trust is formed through real experiences and opinions, and now that 40% of Reddit conversations have a purchase-decision component, Reddit is an influential lever merchants can pull not just to build trust but to amplify it through AI platforms.
The Conversion Disconnect
AI platforms were featured as the new sources of product discovery, comparison, and validation during Shoptalk Spring. Conversations about its power as a purchasing tool, however, were cagey at best. We’ve found in our research that after consumers receive an AI recommendation, they want to visit the brand's site to conduct their own research and eventually make a purchase.
One speaker cited data from eMarketer, which predicted that 8.8% of eCommerce will be agentic. Others shared insights from Merkle, which said 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, and another 10-25% of eCommerce sales will be entirely autonomous. In their closing panel, Shoptalk’s Joe Laszlo and Ben Miller shared the belief that true agentic commerce, where bots buy things on your behalf, is overhyped for now. AI-driven services, like Pearl Planner from David’s Bridal, which offer true process automation and personalized support by helping women navigate more than 300 decisions over 18 months, are very real and offer very real value. Brands are nurturing trust by empowering consumers to act as their own advocates.
Consumer behavior data from Home Depot’s Magic Apron also painted a very real picture of consumers’ trust in AI. “Customers want to be helped, and they want to be helped in the right moment by the right tool,” said Jason Broggi, EVP of Customer Experience and President of Online, The Home Depot. “If that’s a human or a chatbot, it’s really about can I be helpful in the moment?” One of consumers’ favorite use cases on the retailer’s eCommerce site is quickly distilling complex information from different sources to find an answer to a very specific question, such as, “Is this faucet compatible with that valve?” Technically, they could spend a few hours reading through PDPs and scrolling through hundreds of reviews, or they could save hours by using Magic Apron. This is where context, objectivity, and seamlessness come together to build trust.
How Wide is the Employee Trust Gap?
The majority of discussions centered around consumers’ use of AI, and how it will ultimately impact when, why, and how they engage with brands. The real leaders of the show broadened the discussion to touch on what is happening to the people inside these institutions as AI changes the nature of their work and how they measure success. The Home Depot, Macy’s, and Stitch Fix were among the small subset of brands that shared tangible examples of how they use AI as a tool to validate, enrich, and expand employee expertise, while bringing them into the development cycle for future tech innovation. Safety and empowerment drive employee adoption and autonomy, while building trust in leadership.
We predicted that 2026 would be the year of self-sovereign brands, but this can only come to fruition with a cycle of trust. The C-suite must trust employees with the tools to do their best work, and employees must trust leadership to give them the training, upskilling, and support they need. Sessions showed that most brands don’t have a tangible playbook for success, but they do have guidance to help others feel secure in their insecurity so they can effectively test, fail, and learn.
Stitch Fix has built a business on its rich arsenal of first-party data and the expertise of its stylists. Now, the brand is augmenting the two with various AI-powered tools, such as a Style Assistant and visualization experience. The tech helps streamline data collection (Stitch Fix Vision) and turn customer queries into more technical verbiage (Style Assistant). But the real magic happens when stylists are brought into the fold to either validate a bot’s direction or add more context and support to conversations. Although the AI provides Stitch Fix stylists with the data and visuals they need to do their jobs well stylists remain a source of support for both consumers and the AI; they are not displaced.
Macy’s has launched a stylist bot (Ask Macy’s) that creates a similar experience, but the leadership team brought its employees into the fold before the tool went to market, reaffirming their importance in fulfilling the brand promise. “Our store employees know our customers better than anybody else,” said Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni. That’s why leadership had employees walked through different scenarios and call out areas that lacked context, felt pushy, or needed more finesse. With so much historical context about who the Macy’s shopper is and what they really want, employees provided the much-needed guidance leadership needed to fine-tune the tool. At the same time, leadership was able to send a loud message to them that they had the core IP (service knowledge and brand passion) that AI needed to be successful.
These moments of empowerment are happening in organizations of all sizes and across functions. In one side conversation, a tech executive noted that he was using Cursor to build his own apps so he didn’t have to wait for IT or marketing. Armed with the tech, passion, and will to learn, he can move when inspiration and opportunity strike. This is how self-sovereignty becomes business value. The caveat is that leadership teams must invest in training and enablement to help their people get there, and employees must believe that leadership has the vision to operate in their best interest. Sarah Engel of January Digital cited Brookings data that 86% of workers facing high AI displacement risk and low ability to adapt are women. The panel moved on, but the stat was a hidden headline that showed many hard conversations about AI’s influence still need to be had.
The Power of Not Knowing
Earlier this year, we declared that the problem with most industry events is that they are no longer forums for socratic debate. Instead, they are platforms for amplifying PR messaging and promoting new tech partnerships.
Several changes in the Shoptalk experience conveyed a vibe shift. Fewer sessions were tucked away in ballrooms, speakers sat in the same space as the expo hall, and more content focused on tactical guidance, deep dives, and, yes, debates. The team’s expansion of Retail Rumble allowed experts to wax poetic about the industry’s most ambiguous topics. Discussions felt more honest, with more leaders leaning into the uncertainty.
"Ego is out," Engel observed during the closing session. “People are more open about the challenges they’re having, and I have not seen that happen since April or May of 2020.” That's either a sign of genuine humility or an acknowledgment that the stakes are too high to stop posturing. And most times, the answer is found outside of the board room and in conversations with employees, tech partners, and customers. In many cases, it requires simply moving (and falling) to find the answer.
"I think a mistake a lot of companies are making is they're almost being too tentative–meaning they're observing [AI], but they're not trying to figure out how to use it,” said Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah. “And I think only by trying to use it, you then see what works, what doesn't work. This technology, and the quality of the models, is just moving so quickly. Our view is you need to lean in now. And honestly, you could try something, and you can say it's not quite good enough yet, but that probably won't be true in three or six months."
If Merkle is right and 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, that means 25% of brands’ most critical, trust-building moments will start on un-owned platforms owned by Google, OpenAI, and others. Meaningful collaboration with these platforms requires shared trust. Arguably, it’s the key to survival.
Retail leaders must trust their people to act accordingly, which entails hiring the right people and training them to act in the best interest of themselves, their brands, and their customers. Victoria’s Secret & Co CEO Hillary Super called her ability to listen and observe a “superpower.” Early in her tenure, she hired “culture carriers” who she knew understood the vision, had the skill set to carry the vision, and the desire to act without direct order-taking. This intersection between institutional loyalty, a self-starter mentality, and an appetite for change is how real transformation happens. And Super trusts her people to act, learn, and adapt accordingly.
A Matter of Trust
On the surface, "Retail in the Age of AI" was Shoptalk's creative response to an evolving discourse: the industry's buzziest topic was moving from hype to reality. As Shoptalk's Laszlo noted, now that the hype cycle has slowed, there are more tangible learnings, more meaningful advice, and more honest conversations about what is still unknown.
The tagline expresses a more profound takeaway. In the age of AI, the dynamics of retail experience and operations are changing, and trust is being generated and optimized in completely new ways.
Executives who came to Shoptalk were looking for self-actualization: the playbook that would drive a headline-carrying transformation story. But what they got, session after session, was a reminder that you can't skip levels. The safety layer, employees who feel secure, communities that feel heard, and consumers who feel known have to be built before anything above it can be structurally sound. Three days of programming on the future of agentic commerce kept coming back to the same basic question: Have you earned the trust of the people this technology is supposed to serve? Have you yourself used these technologies and found value in them?
You cannot optimize your way to trust, and you cannot agent-commerce your way to belonging.
The brands that proved this at Shoptalk weren't the ones with the most advanced AI. Creators are the new trust layer because they have real experiences and real relationships. Communities like Reddit are foundational to AI because they're made of real opinions. Employees who've spent 40+ years at one company hold something no LLM model can replicate. C-suite leaders who listen more than they declare and pontificate can see around corners the strategy decks don't cover.
If the AI era is promising efficiency, automation, and autonomy, then it’s effectively promising the executive some relief. But in reality, it is delivering expansion. The more capable the tools, the more work that gets done. Maslow’s pyramid promised that once your lower needs were secured, you could ascend. When you hand your labor over to the machine, though, you don’t ascend faster; you find a new floor.
Shoptalk Spring 2026 was the most AI-saturated edition in the event's history. And yet, it kept arriving at the same place, with the same hallway conversations, over and over: the human.
The event’s theme was “Retail in the Age of AI.” In side conversations, press briefings, and even on stages, event leadership told a tightly crafted narrative about how and why this theme came to be: while AI was the most obvious topic of interest, the framing and the tagline’s word choice told a much bigger story.
“The wording of it is very specific…because AI is serving as the backdrop for everything happening today, whether that is in how it's powering your site and personalization, or it's serving as a backdrop for why in-person connections are even more important today,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Global President of Connected Commerce at Hyve, during a press briefing at the show. “When you see the number of people here, and you see the energy, it's very clear that those human interactions are really important.”
In the age of AI, humanity feels like a scarcity. Efficiency and output are prioritized over the time, intention, and care put into tasks. But if the sessions, formats, and experiences of Shoptalk Spring showed us anything, it's that humanity re-enters the equation through one critical lever: trust.
Thousands of executives came to Shoptalk to reach the top of their own hierarchy of needs. They sought self-actualization through C-suite fireside chats and keynotes, looking for a playbook they could deploy (ahem, rinse and repeat) amid rapid technological change. But what they needed, and what the sessions kept exposing, was an unfinished foundation: the need for safety and security, a sense of belonging, and the self-respect and confidence that come from being trusted with the tools to do your best work. The industry was reaching for the penthouse. The pyramid doesn't negotiate.
Last December, Future Commerce predicted that 2026 would be "the year that consumers and companies shift from relying on institutions to relying on themselves." Three months later, Shoptalk confirmed it scene by scene. The consumer who uses ChatGPT to perfect her skincare regimen and still checks the brand's site anyway. The tech executive who builds his own app in Cursor because marketing takes too long. The brand that earns credibility from already-passionate consumers instead of borrowing it from institutions. Trust and autonomy are two sides of the same coin, and where you find both, you find fulfillment.
What’s Actually Changing Consumers’ Trust in Brands
Consumers’ trust in brands and in AI is now intertwined, with one always influencing the other. Word of mouth is still the most powerful lever brands can pull. Our Word of Mouth Index has consistently shown that positive word of mouth is the strongest indicator of brand value and growth. But WOM isn’t just traveling from person to person anymore; it’s flowing fluidly between creators, communities, and AI engines. Leading brands are building for it and creating authentic brand love and belonging in the process, while others are deploying AI into a trust vacuum and wondering why it isn't converting.
Jessica Alba has built The Honest Company on community, not on her celebrity or even on a specific product innovation. She shared how, before “creator economy” was even a phrase, she spent years building relationships and forming a multi-tier creator model that now includes:
- Tier 1: Voices like hers that have broad reach and high credibility
- Tier 2: Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who share similar, authentic stories about parenting and all its unexpected scenarios
- Tier 3: Everyday consumers with small friend and family networks, who are rewarded with free products to share their stories
Now, creator briefs exist solely for legal purposes. Beyond the core “fine print” and three overarching talking points, creators have full creative control. "The more honest and messy, the better," Alba said. In fact, she noted that some of the brand’s most effective content featured creators showing the “messiness,” whether it was a dirty sink, a chaotic laundry room, or a dirty living room. Powerful parenting content shows real-life proof and empathy, not luxury aspiration.
"I think all of the scripted and unscripted content is going to be brand-driven,” Alba said. “When you can collapse the funnel, when the brand has that direct relationship with the creator, you get much richer storytelling."
Digitizing the Civic Square
Trust is the core architecture of The Honest Company’s content doctrine, which is especially profound at a time when most creators lean into hyper-curated feeds, and AI creates this perfection at scale. YouTube has become an especially valuable channel for delivering this authentic content to the masses: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are consumed on the platform daily. It’s why YouTube’s Travis Katz said 78% of Gen Z consumers prefer creator-led content over traditional studio content, and why creator-led videos convert at approximately 30% higher rates than brand-produced ads.
The desire for authenticity and trust is also why Reddit has become one of the most-referred platforms on ChatGPT and other AI engines. The “civic square” of commerce has migrated online, and Reddit is where people go to share their most authentic feelings and get honest recommendations. Because of the anonymity of the platform, there is no pressure to perform and people are “free to share what they actually believe.”
"You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” Huffman said. Trust is formed through real experiences and opinions, and now that 40% of Reddit conversations have a purchase-decision component, Reddit is an influential lever merchants can pull not just to build trust but to amplify it through AI platforms.
The Conversion Disconnect
AI platforms were featured as the new sources of product discovery, comparison, and validation during Shoptalk Spring. Conversations about its power as a purchasing tool, however, were cagey at best. We’ve found in our research that after consumers receive an AI recommendation, they want to visit the brand's site to conduct their own research and eventually make a purchase.
One speaker cited data from eMarketer, which predicted that 8.8% of eCommerce will be agentic. Others shared insights from Merkle, which said 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, and another 10-25% of eCommerce sales will be entirely autonomous. In their closing panel, Shoptalk’s Joe Laszlo and Ben Miller shared the belief that true agentic commerce, where bots buy things on your behalf, is overhyped for now. AI-driven services, like Pearl Planner from David’s Bridal, which offer true process automation and personalized support by helping women navigate more than 300 decisions over 18 months, are very real and offer very real value. Brands are nurturing trust by empowering consumers to act as their own advocates.
Consumer behavior data from Home Depot’s Magic Apron also painted a very real picture of consumers’ trust in AI. “Customers want to be helped, and they want to be helped in the right moment by the right tool,” said Jason Broggi, EVP of Customer Experience and President of Online, The Home Depot. “If that’s a human or a chatbot, it’s really about can I be helpful in the moment?” One of consumers’ favorite use cases on the retailer’s eCommerce site is quickly distilling complex information from different sources to find an answer to a very specific question, such as, “Is this faucet compatible with that valve?” Technically, they could spend a few hours reading through PDPs and scrolling through hundreds of reviews, or they could save hours by using Magic Apron. This is where context, objectivity, and seamlessness come together to build trust.
How Wide is the Employee Trust Gap?
The majority of discussions centered around consumers’ use of AI, and how it will ultimately impact when, why, and how they engage with brands. The real leaders of the show broadened the discussion to touch on what is happening to the people inside these institutions as AI changes the nature of their work and how they measure success. The Home Depot, Macy’s, and Stitch Fix were among the small subset of brands that shared tangible examples of how they use AI as a tool to validate, enrich, and expand employee expertise, while bringing them into the development cycle for future tech innovation. Safety and empowerment drive employee adoption and autonomy, while building trust in leadership.
We predicted that 2026 would be the year of self-sovereign brands, but this can only come to fruition with a cycle of trust. The C-suite must trust employees with the tools to do their best work, and employees must trust leadership to give them the training, upskilling, and support they need. Sessions showed that most brands don’t have a tangible playbook for success, but they do have guidance to help others feel secure in their insecurity so they can effectively test, fail, and learn.
Stitch Fix has built a business on its rich arsenal of first-party data and the expertise of its stylists. Now, the brand is augmenting the two with various AI-powered tools, such as a Style Assistant and visualization experience. The tech helps streamline data collection (Stitch Fix Vision) and turn customer queries into more technical verbiage (Style Assistant). But the real magic happens when stylists are brought into the fold to either validate a bot’s direction or add more context and support to conversations. Although the AI provides Stitch Fix stylists with the data and visuals they need to do their jobs well stylists remain a source of support for both consumers and the AI; they are not displaced.
Macy’s has launched a stylist bot (Ask Macy’s) that creates a similar experience, but the leadership team brought its employees into the fold before the tool went to market, reaffirming their importance in fulfilling the brand promise. “Our store employees know our customers better than anybody else,” said Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni. That’s why leadership had employees walked through different scenarios and call out areas that lacked context, felt pushy, or needed more finesse. With so much historical context about who the Macy’s shopper is and what they really want, employees provided the much-needed guidance leadership needed to fine-tune the tool. At the same time, leadership was able to send a loud message to them that they had the core IP (service knowledge and brand passion) that AI needed to be successful.
These moments of empowerment are happening in organizations of all sizes and across functions. In one side conversation, a tech executive noted that he was using Cursor to build his own apps so he didn’t have to wait for IT or marketing. Armed with the tech, passion, and will to learn, he can move when inspiration and opportunity strike. This is how self-sovereignty becomes business value. The caveat is that leadership teams must invest in training and enablement to help their people get there, and employees must believe that leadership has the vision to operate in their best interest. Sarah Engel of January Digital cited Brookings data that 86% of workers facing high AI displacement risk and low ability to adapt are women. The panel moved on, but the stat was a hidden headline that showed many hard conversations about AI’s influence still need to be had.
The Power of Not Knowing
Earlier this year, we declared that the problem with most industry events is that they are no longer forums for socratic debate. Instead, they are platforms for amplifying PR messaging and promoting new tech partnerships.
Several changes in the Shoptalk experience conveyed a vibe shift. Fewer sessions were tucked away in ballrooms, speakers sat in the same space as the expo hall, and more content focused on tactical guidance, deep dives, and, yes, debates. The team’s expansion of Retail Rumble allowed experts to wax poetic about the industry’s most ambiguous topics. Discussions felt more honest, with more leaders leaning into the uncertainty.
"Ego is out," Engel observed during the closing session. “People are more open about the challenges they’re having, and I have not seen that happen since April or May of 2020.” That's either a sign of genuine humility or an acknowledgment that the stakes are too high to stop posturing. And most times, the answer is found outside of the board room and in conversations with employees, tech partners, and customers. In many cases, it requires simply moving (and falling) to find the answer.
"I think a mistake a lot of companies are making is they're almost being too tentative–meaning they're observing [AI], but they're not trying to figure out how to use it,” said Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah. “And I think only by trying to use it, you then see what works, what doesn't work. This technology, and the quality of the models, is just moving so quickly. Our view is you need to lean in now. And honestly, you could try something, and you can say it's not quite good enough yet, but that probably won't be true in three or six months."
If Merkle is right and 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, that means 25% of brands’ most critical, trust-building moments will start on un-owned platforms owned by Google, OpenAI, and others. Meaningful collaboration with these platforms requires shared trust. Arguably, it’s the key to survival.
Retail leaders must trust their people to act accordingly, which entails hiring the right people and training them to act in the best interest of themselves, their brands, and their customers. Victoria’s Secret & Co CEO Hillary Super called her ability to listen and observe a “superpower.” Early in her tenure, she hired “culture carriers” who she knew understood the vision, had the skill set to carry the vision, and the desire to act without direct order-taking. This intersection between institutional loyalty, a self-starter mentality, and an appetite for change is how real transformation happens. And Super trusts her people to act, learn, and adapt accordingly.
A Matter of Trust
On the surface, "Retail in the Age of AI" was Shoptalk's creative response to an evolving discourse: the industry's buzziest topic was moving from hype to reality. As Shoptalk's Laszlo noted, now that the hype cycle has slowed, there are more tangible learnings, more meaningful advice, and more honest conversations about what is still unknown.
The tagline expresses a more profound takeaway. In the age of AI, the dynamics of retail experience and operations are changing, and trust is being generated and optimized in completely new ways.
Executives who came to Shoptalk were looking for self-actualization: the playbook that would drive a headline-carrying transformation story. But what they got, session after session, was a reminder that you can't skip levels. The safety layer, employees who feel secure, communities that feel heard, and consumers who feel known have to be built before anything above it can be structurally sound. Three days of programming on the future of agentic commerce kept coming back to the same basic question: Have you earned the trust of the people this technology is supposed to serve? Have you yourself used these technologies and found value in them?
You cannot optimize your way to trust, and you cannot agent-commerce your way to belonging.
The brands that proved this at Shoptalk weren't the ones with the most advanced AI. Creators are the new trust layer because they have real experiences and real relationships. Communities like Reddit are foundational to AI because they're made of real opinions. Employees who've spent 40+ years at one company hold something no LLM model can replicate. C-suite leaders who listen more than they declare and pontificate can see around corners the strategy decks don't cover.
If the AI era is promising efficiency, automation, and autonomy, then it’s effectively promising the executive some relief. But in reality, it is delivering expansion. The more capable the tools, the more work that gets done. Maslow’s pyramid promised that once your lower needs were secured, you could ascend. When you hand your labor over to the machine, though, you don’t ascend faster; you find a new floor.
Shoptalk Spring 2026 was the most AI-saturated edition in the event's history. And yet, it kept arriving at the same place, with the same hallway conversations, over and over: the human.
The event’s theme was “Retail in the Age of AI.” In side conversations, press briefings, and even on stages, event leadership told a tightly crafted narrative about how and why this theme came to be: while AI was the most obvious topic of interest, the framing and the tagline’s word choice told a much bigger story.
“The wording of it is very specific…because AI is serving as the backdrop for everything happening today, whether that is in how it's powering your site and personalization, or it's serving as a backdrop for why in-person connections are even more important today,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Global President of Connected Commerce at Hyve, during a press briefing at the show. “When you see the number of people here, and you see the energy, it's very clear that those human interactions are really important.”
In the age of AI, humanity feels like a scarcity. Efficiency and output are prioritized over the time, intention, and care put into tasks. But if the sessions, formats, and experiences of Shoptalk Spring showed us anything, it's that humanity re-enters the equation through one critical lever: trust.
Thousands of executives came to Shoptalk to reach the top of their own hierarchy of needs. They sought self-actualization through C-suite fireside chats and keynotes, looking for a playbook they could deploy (ahem, rinse and repeat) amid rapid technological change. But what they needed, and what the sessions kept exposing, was an unfinished foundation: the need for safety and security, a sense of belonging, and the self-respect and confidence that come from being trusted with the tools to do your best work. The industry was reaching for the penthouse. The pyramid doesn't negotiate.
Last December, Future Commerce predicted that 2026 would be "the year that consumers and companies shift from relying on institutions to relying on themselves." Three months later, Shoptalk confirmed it scene by scene. The consumer who uses ChatGPT to perfect her skincare regimen and still checks the brand's site anyway. The tech executive who builds his own app in Cursor because marketing takes too long. The brand that earns credibility from already-passionate consumers instead of borrowing it from institutions. Trust and autonomy are two sides of the same coin, and where you find both, you find fulfillment.
What’s Actually Changing Consumers’ Trust in Brands
Consumers’ trust in brands and in AI is now intertwined, with one always influencing the other. Word of mouth is still the most powerful lever brands can pull. Our Word of Mouth Index has consistently shown that positive word of mouth is the strongest indicator of brand value and growth. But WOM isn’t just traveling from person to person anymore; it’s flowing fluidly between creators, communities, and AI engines. Leading brands are building for it and creating authentic brand love and belonging in the process, while others are deploying AI into a trust vacuum and wondering why it isn't converting.
Jessica Alba has built The Honest Company on community, not on her celebrity or even on a specific product innovation. She shared how, before “creator economy” was even a phrase, she spent years building relationships and forming a multi-tier creator model that now includes:
- Tier 1: Voices like hers that have broad reach and high credibility
- Tier 2: Creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who share similar, authentic stories about parenting and all its unexpected scenarios
- Tier 3: Everyday consumers with small friend and family networks, who are rewarded with free products to share their stories
Now, creator briefs exist solely for legal purposes. Beyond the core “fine print” and three overarching talking points, creators have full creative control. "The more honest and messy, the better," Alba said. In fact, she noted that some of the brand’s most effective content featured creators showing the “messiness,” whether it was a dirty sink, a chaotic laundry room, or a dirty living room. Powerful parenting content shows real-life proof and empathy, not luxury aspiration.
"I think all of the scripted and unscripted content is going to be brand-driven,” Alba said. “When you can collapse the funnel, when the brand has that direct relationship with the creator, you get much richer storytelling."
Digitizing the Civic Square
Trust is the core architecture of The Honest Company’s content doctrine, which is especially profound at a time when most creators lean into hyper-curated feeds, and AI creates this perfection at scale. YouTube has become an especially valuable channel for delivering this authentic content to the masses: 110 million hours of shopping-related content are consumed on the platform daily. It’s why YouTube’s Travis Katz said 78% of Gen Z consumers prefer creator-led content over traditional studio content, and why creator-led videos convert at approximately 30% higher rates than brand-produced ads.
The desire for authenticity and trust is also why Reddit has become one of the most-referred platforms on ChatGPT and other AI engines. The “civic square” of commerce has migrated online, and Reddit is where people go to share their most authentic feelings and get honest recommendations. Because of the anonymity of the platform, there is no pressure to perform and people are “free to share what they actually believe.”
"You can't have artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” Huffman said. Trust is formed through real experiences and opinions, and now that 40% of Reddit conversations have a purchase-decision component, Reddit is an influential lever merchants can pull not just to build trust but to amplify it through AI platforms.
The Conversion Disconnect
AI platforms were featured as the new sources of product discovery, comparison, and validation during Shoptalk Spring. Conversations about its power as a purchasing tool, however, were cagey at best. We’ve found in our research that after consumers receive an AI recommendation, they want to visit the brand's site to conduct their own research and eventually make a purchase.
One speaker cited data from eMarketer, which predicted that 8.8% of eCommerce will be agentic. Others shared insights from Merkle, which said 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, and another 10-25% of eCommerce sales will be entirely autonomous. In their closing panel, Shoptalk’s Joe Laszlo and Ben Miller shared the belief that true agentic commerce, where bots buy things on your behalf, is overhyped for now. AI-driven services, like Pearl Planner from David’s Bridal, which offer true process automation and personalized support by helping women navigate more than 300 decisions over 18 months, are very real and offer very real value. Brands are nurturing trust by empowering consumers to act as their own advocates.
Consumer behavior data from Home Depot’s Magic Apron also painted a very real picture of consumers’ trust in AI. “Customers want to be helped, and they want to be helped in the right moment by the right tool,” said Jason Broggi, EVP of Customer Experience and President of Online, The Home Depot. “If that’s a human or a chatbot, it’s really about can I be helpful in the moment?” One of consumers’ favorite use cases on the retailer’s eCommerce site is quickly distilling complex information from different sources to find an answer to a very specific question, such as, “Is this faucet compatible with that valve?” Technically, they could spend a few hours reading through PDPs and scrolling through hundreds of reviews, or they could save hours by using Magic Apron. This is where context, objectivity, and seamlessness come together to build trust.
How Wide is the Employee Trust Gap?
The majority of discussions centered around consumers’ use of AI, and how it will ultimately impact when, why, and how they engage with brands. The real leaders of the show broadened the discussion to touch on what is happening to the people inside these institutions as AI changes the nature of their work and how they measure success. The Home Depot, Macy’s, and Stitch Fix were among the small subset of brands that shared tangible examples of how they use AI as a tool to validate, enrich, and expand employee expertise, while bringing them into the development cycle for future tech innovation. Safety and empowerment drive employee adoption and autonomy, while building trust in leadership.
We predicted that 2026 would be the year of self-sovereign brands, but this can only come to fruition with a cycle of trust. The C-suite must trust employees with the tools to do their best work, and employees must trust leadership to give them the training, upskilling, and support they need. Sessions showed that most brands don’t have a tangible playbook for success, but they do have guidance to help others feel secure in their insecurity so they can effectively test, fail, and learn.
Stitch Fix has built a business on its rich arsenal of first-party data and the expertise of its stylists. Now, the brand is augmenting the two with various AI-powered tools, such as a Style Assistant and visualization experience. The tech helps streamline data collection (Stitch Fix Vision) and turn customer queries into more technical verbiage (Style Assistant). But the real magic happens when stylists are brought into the fold to either validate a bot’s direction or add more context and support to conversations. Although the AI provides Stitch Fix stylists with the data and visuals they need to do their jobs well stylists remain a source of support for both consumers and the AI; they are not displaced.
Macy’s has launched a stylist bot (Ask Macy’s) that creates a similar experience, but the leadership team brought its employees into the fold before the tool went to market, reaffirming their importance in fulfilling the brand promise. “Our store employees know our customers better than anybody else,” said Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni. That’s why leadership had employees walked through different scenarios and call out areas that lacked context, felt pushy, or needed more finesse. With so much historical context about who the Macy’s shopper is and what they really want, employees provided the much-needed guidance leadership needed to fine-tune the tool. At the same time, leadership was able to send a loud message to them that they had the core IP (service knowledge and brand passion) that AI needed to be successful.
These moments of empowerment are happening in organizations of all sizes and across functions. In one side conversation, a tech executive noted that he was using Cursor to build his own apps so he didn’t have to wait for IT or marketing. Armed with the tech, passion, and will to learn, he can move when inspiration and opportunity strike. This is how self-sovereignty becomes business value. The caveat is that leadership teams must invest in training and enablement to help their people get there, and employees must believe that leadership has the vision to operate in their best interest. Sarah Engel of January Digital cited Brookings data that 86% of workers facing high AI displacement risk and low ability to adapt are women. The panel moved on, but the stat was a hidden headline that showed many hard conversations about AI’s influence still need to be had.
The Power of Not Knowing
Earlier this year, we declared that the problem with most industry events is that they are no longer forums for socratic debate. Instead, they are platforms for amplifying PR messaging and promoting new tech partnerships.
Several changes in the Shoptalk experience conveyed a vibe shift. Fewer sessions were tucked away in ballrooms, speakers sat in the same space as the expo hall, and more content focused on tactical guidance, deep dives, and, yes, debates. The team’s expansion of Retail Rumble allowed experts to wax poetic about the industry’s most ambiguous topics. Discussions felt more honest, with more leaders leaning into the uncertainty.
"Ego is out," Engel observed during the closing session. “People are more open about the challenges they’re having, and I have not seen that happen since April or May of 2020.” That's either a sign of genuine humility or an acknowledgment that the stakes are too high to stop posturing. And most times, the answer is found outside of the board room and in conversations with employees, tech partners, and customers. In many cases, it requires simply moving (and falling) to find the answer.
"I think a mistake a lot of companies are making is they're almost being too tentative–meaning they're observing [AI], but they're not trying to figure out how to use it,” said Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah. “And I think only by trying to use it, you then see what works, what doesn't work. This technology, and the quality of the models, is just moving so quickly. Our view is you need to lean in now. And honestly, you could try something, and you can say it's not quite good enough yet, but that probably won't be true in three or six months."
If Merkle is right and 25% of eCommerce will flow through answer engines by 2029, that means 25% of brands’ most critical, trust-building moments will start on un-owned platforms owned by Google, OpenAI, and others. Meaningful collaboration with these platforms requires shared trust. Arguably, it’s the key to survival.
Retail leaders must trust their people to act accordingly, which entails hiring the right people and training them to act in the best interest of themselves, their brands, and their customers. Victoria’s Secret & Co CEO Hillary Super called her ability to listen and observe a “superpower.” Early in her tenure, she hired “culture carriers” who she knew understood the vision, had the skill set to carry the vision, and the desire to act without direct order-taking. This intersection between institutional loyalty, a self-starter mentality, and an appetite for change is how real transformation happens. And Super trusts her people to act, learn, and adapt accordingly.
A Matter of Trust
On the surface, "Retail in the Age of AI" was Shoptalk's creative response to an evolving discourse: the industry's buzziest topic was moving from hype to reality. As Shoptalk's Laszlo noted, now that the hype cycle has slowed, there are more tangible learnings, more meaningful advice, and more honest conversations about what is still unknown.
The tagline expresses a more profound takeaway. In the age of AI, the dynamics of retail experience and operations are changing, and trust is being generated and optimized in completely new ways.
Executives who came to Shoptalk were looking for self-actualization: the playbook that would drive a headline-carrying transformation story. But what they got, session after session, was a reminder that you can't skip levels. The safety layer, employees who feel secure, communities that feel heard, and consumers who feel known have to be built before anything above it can be structurally sound. Three days of programming on the future of agentic commerce kept coming back to the same basic question: Have you earned the trust of the people this technology is supposed to serve? Have you yourself used these technologies and found value in them?
You cannot optimize your way to trust, and you cannot agent-commerce your way to belonging.
The brands that proved this at Shoptalk weren't the ones with the most advanced AI. Creators are the new trust layer because they have real experiences and real relationships. Communities like Reddit are foundational to AI because they're made of real opinions. Employees who've spent 40+ years at one company hold something no LLM model can replicate. C-suite leaders who listen more than they declare and pontificate can see around corners the strategy decks don't cover.
If the AI era is promising efficiency, automation, and autonomy, then it’s effectively promising the executive some relief. But in reality, it is delivering expansion. The more capable the tools, the more work that gets done. Maslow’s pyramid promised that once your lower needs were secured, you could ascend. When you hand your labor over to the machine, though, you don’t ascend faster; you find a new floor.
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