Retail Tech Show 2026: What the Show Floor Was Really Saying

Two days at ExCeL. Hundreds of vendors. Thousands of conversations. And yet, walking away from the Retail Technology Show this year, what stayed with me was not any single product demo or headline announcement. It was the mood. RTS 2026 felt like an industry collectively exhaling after years of saying “we need to do something” and finally starting to mean it.

From hype to execution: AI grows up

The framing around AI at this year’s show was notably different from previous years. Rather than treating it as a future-facing concept, the emphasis was firmly on how retailers can use it to improve day-to-day performance, support teams more effectively and make better operational decisions. The vendors who cut through were not the ones with the boldest claims. They were the ones who could show a working deployment, a measurable outcome, a real store.

That shift in tone matters. AI is only as valuable as the problem it is quietly solving, and the industry seems to have arrived at that conclusion in a meaningful way.

Personalisation and the individual customer

Running alongside the AI conversation was an equally strong thread around personalisation. The sentiment that kept surfacing across the show was simple but pointed: treat every customer as an individual, not a number, not a data point.

What was interesting at RTS this year was how that sentiment was showing up in practical technology. Platforms were demonstrating how bricks-and-mortar retailers can close the in-store data gap through smarter digital touchpoints, converting the checkout moment into the start of an ongoing customer relationship rather than the end of a transaction. The idea of using the store itself as a personalisation engine, rather than relying entirely on digital channels, felt like one of the more forward-thinking threads running through the show floor. European retailers in particular have an opportunity here. The physical store is still trusted and valued by shoppers in this market. The question is how well the technology underneath it can support the experience on top.

Resilience is now a boardroom word, not just an ops word

The high-profile cyberattacks on major UK retailers in 2025 catapulted cyber resilience onto boardroom agendas in a way that few things do. RTS reflected that shift with an entirely new Cyber and Loss Prevention Zone, and the energy around it was real. But what struck me more broadly was how resilience as a theme had expanded well beyond cybersecurity. Senior retail leaders were candid about the pressure they are under, with the prevailing sentiment being that it has never been tougher to run a retail business. Cost pressures, supply chain uncertainty, and shifting consumer behaviour are all colliding at once.

The implication for technology decisions is significant. Retailers are no longer primarily asking “what is the most innovative option?” They are asking “what will still be working when things get hard?” That is a different evaluation framework, and it is pushing buyers toward platforms that are reliable, flexible, and do not require wholesale replacement every few years to keep pace.

The thing nobody was quite saying out loud

Here is the observation that kept forming in the back of my mind.

Walking away from ExCeL, the overarching sentiment felt clear to me. AI, personalisation, and resilience are not three separate conversations. They are three expressions of the same underlying challenge: building a store operation that is coherent enough to actually deliver on them. And at the centre of that is the store associate, the person who has to bring all of it to life in a single moment with a single customer. The retailers who invest in giving that person the right foundation to work from will not just survive the current pressure. They will be the ones setting the pace when it eases.