Retail’s Massive Present, the NRF’s annual flagship occasion in New York Metropolis earlier this week, is the place you go for a way of what’s taking place inside retail writ giant, past the data-driven promoting nook of the universe we usually concentrate on.
This was solely my second Massive Present, so I can’t decide a lot when it comes to historic change. Nevertheless, just a few issues did strike me concerning the 2026 occasion, even in comparison with only a yr in the past.
Whats up, influencers
Influencers usually discuss with themselves a “creators.” Typically, retailers will use a extra ambiguous “group” framing and even “expertise relations.” Essentially the most unabashed will communicate brazenly of a social affiliate community.
However name them what you want, social influencers had a significant presence this yr.
Walmart, for instance, despatched Sarah Henry, its VP of content material, influencer and commerce, to debate the retailer’s creator packages.
Pacsun, in the meantime, took the chance to announce its “PS Group Hub,” a brand new app that’s half buying market and half social influencer affiliate portal.
Corporations like Uber, Shopify and Instacart now present up on the Massive Present as sponsors and exhibitors, whereas influencers tag together with the large platform gamers, which, in flip, try to promote social viewers extensions to entrepreneurs.
And retailers and Amazon retailers mentioned on stage how they’ve just lately leaned into influencer advertising, One session, that includes Crocs and Tarte Cosmetics, was known as “Suppose like a marketer, act like a creator,” whereas Walmart, H&M and American Eagle appeared on a panel entitled “Retail creators: Tradition that converts”.
Within the US market, TikTok and Instagram nonetheless aren’t the sort of direct-shopping platforms that we’ve seen thrive in China. However retailers and omnichannel sellers are adapting, utilizing these platforms to face up affiliate packages or preserve extra always-on relationships with creators, quite than treating influencers as a one-off addition to a advertising marketing campaign.
No ‘retail’ with out “AI”
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However influencers weren’t the one massive factor on the Massive Present.
Maybe you’ve heard of agentic AI?
AI isn’t just a pattern or buzzword. As your reporter on-the-ground, my learn is that there’s a real sense of curiosity – even from individuals who don’t have one thing to promote. In different phrases, this isn’t just like the blockchain or Web3 hype cycles of the previous, when the general public being pitched had hit the psychological snooze button and clearly didn’t anticipate to ever want to know how on-chain transactions or no matter really work.
This new urgency – and also you may even name it nervousness – is, I feel, being amplified by the complicated and always evolving alliances and integrations amongst tech firms forming on account of AI tech.
For instance, Google and Shopify co-developed a brand new agentic framework for ecommerce, which they name the Common Commerce Protocol (UCP). It’s backed by retailers together with Walmart, Goal, Etsy and Wayfair.
A few months in the past, OpenAI debuted the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which it constructed with cost processor Stripe and since added PayPal.
These protocols combine with most of the identical retailers or Shopify retailers, and so they’re all chasing the identical purpose, which is to consolidate round a single requirements or a minimum of as few as attainable.
“You may surprise why we’re introducing one other protocol,” stated Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai throughout his NRF keynote deal with this week.
Pichai appeared to anticipate the collective groan at one more community and addition to the acronym soup.
There’s ACP and UCP, that are MCPs, not APIs, which might be constructed on PCI-DSS requirements and combine with the PSPs.
Even for the programmatic area, it’s getting fairly out of hand.
Pichai justified Google and Shopify including one other to the rising listing of agentic commerce protocols as a result of “the trade wants a protocol that works at international scale and takes under consideration the nuances of commerce journeys.”
He framed these journeys as a “crucial constructing block” for creating a common customary. However make no mistake, that is Google planting a flag , asserting its proper to ascertain stated customary primarily based on its international scale and understanding of the “nuances of commerce journeys,” as Pichai put it, in distinction to, ostensibly, OpenAI.
The priority among the many retailers and entrepreneurs I spoke with about these agentic protocols is whether or not they can exist inside walled gardens like Amazon and Google, which have what you may name a content material fortress mentality.
Google describes its new protocol, UCP, as “agnostic” and “appropriate” with many present trade protocols. The weblog submit cites integrations with Agent2Agent, which is Google’s protocol for agentic engagements, in addition to Google’s Agent Funds Protocol and the Mannequin Context Protocol developed by Anthropic.
For a lot of largish Shopify retailers or mid-size retailers, although, these high-level debates about protocols really feel a bit faraway from their day-to-day realities.
Their extra instant problem proper now could be selecting between, say, Databricks or Snowflake, one AI vendor gross sales exec informed me in the course of the Massive Present.
Disentangling the net of protocols and determining how, when and the place these totally different frameworks all match collectively, he added, “is an issue for, like, NRF Massive Present 2028.”
