Last week I was on the floor at ShopTalk 2026, and the conversations I had left me thinking about our clients the whole flight home. Not because the technology on display was flashy, though it was, but because the challenges being discussed were ones I hear from my contacts every week.
Here's what I took away, and why it matters for how we work together.
The data is there. Making sense of it is the hard part.
The number one pain point I heard from eCommerce leaders? They're drowning in data and starving for insight. Teams collect everything from behavioral signals, purchase history, inventory feeds, and campaign performance, but they're still spending hours reconciling spreadsheets and switching between systems just to get a single read on what's happening.
Inventory management came up constantly, especially for brands operating across multiple warehouses and platforms. One leader put it plainly: "If I could get one consolidated report without three people touching it, I could actually make decisions." That's not a technology problem. That's a workflow problem and it's exactly the kind of problem AI agents are built to solve.
The fastest ROI from AI isn't always in the customer experience. It's often in the internal workflows your team works through every day, like forecasting, operations, inventory.
AI is delivering real ROI, but only where it's deployed with intention.
The clearest signal from ShopTalk: AI is no longer a future investment. It's already delivering measurable lifts in the places teams have committed to it. The use cases showing up most consistently in the funnel numbers:
What's changed most is the speed. AI-driven experimentation lets teams test, learn, and iterate at a pace that wasn't possible two years ago. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets, they're the ones running more experiments, faster. And they're treating AI as a core part of the commerce engine, not a bolt-on.
One more thing worth flagging: agent-driven commerce is closer than most teams realize. Bot-to-bot shopping will reshape how products get discovered, favoring brands with strong pricing transparency, reliable logistics, and machine-readable product data. If that's not on your roadmap yet, it should be.
The best AI is invisible and still human at its core.
One of the themes I kept returning to in conversation: the most impactful AI deployments are the ones your customers never notice. AI that quietly enhances the experience without disrupting what makes the brand worth experiencing in the first place.
Conversational AI works best when it's solving a utility problem not when it's trying to tell your brand story. Creative discovery can be accelerated with AI, but the final expression has to stay human. And personalization should feel like a friend who knows you not an algorithm that's tracking you. These aren't limitations. They're guardrails that protect what makes your brand worth experiencing.
Fewer partners, more progress.
A theme that came up more than once: the brands seeing the most efficiency gains are consolidating their agency relationships. When your development team, design team, and marketing team are all operating from the same data and the same strategic vision you stop losing time to handoffs and alignment gaps.
That's not a pitch. It's just what I kept hearing from people doing the work.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you're sitting on data you can't act on, or you're watching AI hype from the sidelines because you're not sure where to start, let's talk. We spend a lot of time helping teams figure out where AI investment actually moves the needle.