Top Retail News This Week

Last week, we explored how AI and automation are moving from pilots to full-scale operations across fulfillment, delivery, stores, and consumer tech. This week’s retail news, that momentum sharpens as NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show opens in New York, placing agentic AI and experience-led retail at the center of the industry’s next phase.

• NRF 2026 sets the direction: Retail leaders highlighted a converging pivot toward agentic AI, where conversational commerce and community-focused stores define relevance beyond price and efficiency. For example, destination stores like DICK’s House of Sport are built around activities (ice rink, wall climbing, and multi-sport cage), community, and brand connection instead of focusing only on selling products.
• Walmart accelerates the agentic AI race: Walmart is pushing both agent-driven commerce and retail media, reportedly deploying AI agents across shopping and operations by partnering with Google Gemini and expanding AI tools in Walmart Connect, directly challenging Amazon as AI assistants become the next battleground for ecommerce and advertising.
• AI infrastructure is Meta’s next focus: Beyond retail, Meta’s launch of an AI infrastructure initiative shows how compute, energy, and data center capacity become defining competitive markers. As hyperscalers (major cloud service providers) race to support AI systems at scale, infrastructure investment is increasingly becoming the foundation for everything retailers want to build next.

NRF 2026 and these broader announcements make it hard to argue that AI is still optional in retail. The winners will be retailers that control the customer relationship and turn agentic AI into experiences that actually feel more helpful, not just more automated.

AI Agents Are Now Retail’s New Power Players

Any remaining doubt that AI in retail was still experimental disappeared at NRF 2026. The industry has clearly entered an agentic era, where AI doesn’t just analyze or recommend, but actively guides discovery, decisions, and transactions. At the same time, retailers are redefining value beyond price.

Agentic AI Meets Experience-Led Retail

At the 2026 Retail’s Big Show, industry leaders framed AI not as a replacement for people, but as a productivity engine that reshapes how commerce works end to end. Physical retail, meanwhile, is being reimagined as social infrastructure.

A standout example came from DICK’S Sporting Goods, whose House of Sport concept flips traditional store economics on its head. Instead of optimizing for shelf density, these stores are built around:

• Activities (indoor turf fields, climbing walls, ice rink, multi-sport cage, and golf).
• Services and community engagement (turning the store into a place people use).
• Brand immersion over transactional efficiency (try gear in a real setting or get expert fitting on-site before making a purchase).

The philosophy is intentionally disruptive: build the store that could kill your existing model before someone else does. For sellers and brands, the takeaway is that experience is becoming a defensible moat in a world where AI can replicate product discovery and price comparison instantly.

AI, in this context, supports execution. It improves staffing efficiency, inventory planning, and personalization, but the emotional and experiential layer remains human.

Open Rails for Agentic Commerce, And Why Ownership Matters

On the digital side, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described AI as a platform shift on par with mobile or search. As shopping journeys move from keywords to conversations, the industry needs shared infrastructure to let AI agents transact reliably.

That’s where Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) comes in. UCP is designed to solve a core problem with AI shopping: how an AI agent moves smoothly from discovery to checkout without breaking trust, fragmenting integrations, or stealing the customer relationship. In short, UCP acts as a shared “common language” between AI agents and retailers.

The promise is simple but powerful:

• From discovery to checkout in one flow: UCP lets AI agents discover a retailer’s real-time capabilities (products, pricing, inventory, checkout, and discounts) through a unified integration. That means an agent can recommend a product, build a cart, apply promotions, and initiate checkout without bouncing the shopper across multiple systems.
• Retailers remain as the official seller in the transaction: Even when discovery happens inside an AI interface like Google Search or Gemini, the transaction is executed using the retailer’s own business logic, payments, and fulfillment. The retailer controls pricing, policies, and order management from end to end.
• Customer relationships remain retailer-owned: UCP doesn’t insert Google as an intermediary seller. Identity, order history, loyalty benefits, and post-purchase engagement stay with the retailer, not the AI platform. So, unlike models where platforms like Amazon are accused of using seller data to compete against them directly, Google facilitates the journey, but doesn’t own the customer.

For sellers, this is a critical distinction. Agentic AI can drive demand, but whoever owns identity, data, and checkout owns the customer.

Walmart Gemini AI: Collapsing “I Want It” and “I Have It”

That framework moves from theory to reality in Walmart’s Gemini partnership. By embedding Walmart and Sam’s Club shopping directly into Gemini, customers can:

• Discover products through natural language.
• Compare options using AI summaries.
• Complete checkout within Walmart’s ecosystem.

As incoming Walmart CEO John Furner put it, the goal is to collapse the gap between “I want it” and “I have it,” and do so in a way that fits naturally into how people already search and plan their lives.

This puts new pressure on Amazon, which has long benefited from owning both discovery and checkout inside its own marketplace. Walmart’s Gemini integration challenges that advantage by extending its storefront into external AI platforms, much like Amazon has done with Rufus, but with a key difference.

Google’s approach is intentionally open, positioning Gemini as a neutral layer that can work across multiple retailers rather than locking consumers into a single ecosystem. According to Walmart AI exec Daniel Danker, Gemini’s tighter checkout integration gives it an edge by reducing friction at the point of purchase.

In competitive terms, Walmart’s move indicates that ecommerce is no longer just about marketplaces versus direct-to-consumer sites. If conversational AI becomes a primary shopping interface, retailers that aren’t integrated into those flows risk disappearing at the moment of intent.

Walmart’s parallel partnerships (with Gemini on one side and ChatGPT on the other) show a deliberate strategy to be present wherever AI-driven shopping happens, which may help narrow the gap with Amazon.

Walmart vs. Amazon: The AI Arms Race in Advertising Begins

Walmart is no longer tiptoeing into AI-powered commerce, it’s sprinting. Quietly tested back in November 2025, Walmart’s move to introduce advertising inside its AI shopping agent Sparky is now official and scalable.

Here’s why it matters:

• Walmart Sparky Sponsored Prompts ads are added directly into conversational shopping flows. Suppose a shopper asks Sparky, “What’s a good protein powder for recovery?” and the response naturally includes a sponsored suggestion like, “Many shoppers choose Brand X. Want to see details or add it to your cart?” The ad appears inside the conversation, right when the shopper is already deciding, instead of as a separate banner or pop-up.
• Marty, Walmart’s advertising assistant, helps brands manage bidding, billing, and optimization via chat.
• GenAI tools cut creative production time by up to 80%, according to Walmart.
• Advertisers gain performance insights from closed-loop, first-party data.

While Amazon set the early standard with Rufus and its agentic ad stack, Walmart’s momentum is accelerating. Walmart Connect generated $4.4 billion in 2024 and reported 53% year-over-year global ad growth in Q3 2025 (well ahead of Amazon’s 24% increase) driven by Walmart’s scale of first-party retail data and end-to-end measurement.

For sellers, this could mean:

• AI assistants are becoming premium ad real estate.
• Search-based optimization is giving way to conversational influence.
• Visibility inside AI responses may soon matter more than keyword rank.

The next retail media war won’t be fought on banner ads or sponsored listings, but inside AI-generated answers.

Why Meta’s AI Infrastructure Bet Matters to Retail

While retail giants battle over AI-driven commerce, Meta is making a different but related move: building the infrastructure to power it all.

Meta’s new Meta Compute initiative, backed by plans to build hundreds of gigawatts of AI capacity, highlights a critical truth: agentic retail only works if hyperscalers can deliver cheap, reliable, always-on compute. This puts Meta in direct competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, each betting that today’s infrastructure spending will unlock tomorrow’s monetization.

For businesses, this matters because:

• AI capabilities will increasingly depend on platform-level economics.
• Energy and compute constraints (when demand for AI exceeds the available processing power) could shape which tools scale fastest.
• The cost of AI-powered retail experiences may vary widely by platform.

Analysts told Invezz, a finance news platform, that the industry is approaching a turning point: either AI demand materializes at scale, or hyperscalers will be forced to rethink their bets. Retail is one of the few sectors positioned to actually generate that end-user demand.

Final Thoughts

All in all, these updates tell a coherent story. The focus has moved beyond simply adding AI tools and toward positioning the business within an agent-driven economy. It’s where AI assistants are starting to influence purchase decisions earlier in the customer journey, while retail media pivots from static placements to conversational touchpoints. Lastly, experience, trust, and customer data ownership now matter more, and control of checkout remains a key source of leverage as discovery spreads across AI-driven channels.

Other Amazon Sellers News This Week

1. Amazon Vendor News: Review Sharing Changes Across Variations (Starts Feb 12, 2026)

Amazon is updating how reviews are shared across product variations, a change that could impact star ratings and review counts for many ASINs. Going forward, reviews will only carry over between variations with minor, non-functional differences, while materially different versions will stand on their own as the rollout progresses by category from February through May. Vendors should review and clean up variation relationships now to ensure product differences are accurately defined before reviews are reassigned.

2. Amazon Vendor On-Time Shipment Policy Update

Amazon is raising its on-time shipment requirement to 95% and will now measure compliance using vendor-submitted Advance Shipment Notifications (ASNs) instead of internal receive data. With chargebacks beginning February 25, vendors should use the visibility window to improve ASN accuracy and reassess whether cancelling late orders is less costly than shipping them.

3. Amazon UK Business Supplier Programme: Returns Policy Update (Effective Jan 21, 2026)

Sellers using Invoice by Amazon for FBM orders will now be required to submit photo evidence and condition details when items are sent back used or damaged, with Amazon determining the refund amount. The update applies only to Invoice by Amazon users, and continued use after January 21 suggests acceptance. Be sure to review return workflows now to avoid delays or reduced refunds.

4. Amazon Prepaid Return Labels Required for All Eligible Items (Starts Feb 8, 2026)

Amazon is removing the high-value exemption for prepaid return labels on seller-fulfilled orders, requiring all eligible returns to use Amazon Prepaid Return Labels (APRL), and shortening refund timelines from 14 to 7 days.

Amazon positions this as a simplification, but as Amazon expert Vanessa Hung points out, seller reaction has been intense, with concerns around limited insurance on prepaid labels, reduced ability to guide safe packaging for high-value items, increased “borrow and return” behavior, weaker carrier claim outcomes, and the loss of buyer-seller communication. It’s critical to evaluate margin exposure and return risk, especially for bulky, high-value, or low-margin products.

5. eBay UK Fee Structure Changes (Effective Feb 12)

eBay is increasing the per-order Final Value Fee for UK business sellers on orders over £10 from 30p to 40p, with additional variable fee changes in select categories. The update applies to both new and existing listings (excluding VAT), so sellers should review final value fees by category and adjust pricing ahead of the February 12 rollout.