Ask a room full of people working in digital commerce what will shape the future of the industry and there is one answer you can almost guarantee will come up.
So, at this year’s Sync event in Manchester, we took it off the table.
We asked attendees a simple question: What’s your hot take on the future of commerce? What’s the trend, technology or shift you think everyone will be talking about next?
There was just one rule. You couldn’t say AI.
This wasn’t a scientific survey. We collected a small number of responses from people at the event, but what interested us was how quickly some common themes started to appear.
Personalisation came up more than once. So did the return of physical customer experiences. Others talked about connected systems, mobile wallets, instant returns, human influence and the orchestration technology sitting behind increasingly complicated customer journeys.
And then there was perhaps the boldest prediction of the lot: within two years, agents will increasingly be checking out on behalf of people.
So, what do those answers tell us about where commerce could be heading?
Personalisation is moving beyond the website
Personalisation certainly isn’t new, but the responses at Sync suggest the conversation around it is changing.
Rather than simply recommending another product based on something a customer has viewed, the opportunity increasingly lies in connecting what we know about customers across channels and using that insight to create genuinely useful experiences.
One response described the opportunity as “personalising at scale on and offline”. That distinction matters.
The customer doesn’t necessarily think in channels. They may research on social, browse a website, visit a store, join a loyalty programme and ultimately buy somewhere else entirely. The challenge for retailers is recognising enough of that journey to make each interaction feel connected without making personalisation feel intrusive.
It is telling that personalisation remains firmly on the industry agenda. This month’s Ecommerce Expo is dedicating a session specifically to moving beyond basic personalisation towards experiences shaped by customer behaviour, context and real-time insight.
The technology may have moved on considerably, but the fundamental challenge remains the same: turning the data retailers hold into something genuinely useful for the customer.
Connected commerce is still unfinished business
That brings us neatly to another theme that came through at Sync: connection.
One attendee described the future as “unified systems, one access and everything in sync”, while another pointed towards always-on orchestration across different systems.
Neither sounds as shiny as the latest piece of technology, but arguably this is where some of the biggest work still needs to happen.
Recent Retail Economics research into unified commerce found that only one in five retailers believes it currently delivers a truly unified experience. More strikingly, 86% said customer expectations are evolving faster than their digital capabilities, while 40% of larger and omnichannel retailers identified legacy systems, silos and slow decision-making as barriers.
That gap is important.
Customers increasingly expect stock, loyalty, orders, returns, customer service and communication to work together regardless of where an interaction begins. Internally, however, many retailers are still dealing with legacy platforms, disconnected data and organisational silos.
Perhaps the next stage of commerce isn’t about adding another channel at all. It is about finally connecting the ones businesses already have.
Physical retail is becoming an experience again
Some of our responses independently pointed towards physical customer experience, and we think this is one of the more interesting predictions.
For years, conversations about the future of commerce tended to position physical and digital retail against one another. Increasingly, that distinction feels outdated.
New research from American Express and Retail Economics, reported by Retail Gazette in September, estimates that social media now influences 1.7 billion visits to UK high streets every year. Almost two-thirds of UK adults surveyed had visited a shop, restaurant or hospitality venue in the previous year because of something they had seen on social media.
Digital discovery is driving physical behaviour.
We’re seeing retailers respond to that convergence too. John Lewis recently opened a permanent content studio inside its Oxford Street store, designed to create social and video content from within the physical retail environment itself.
If convenience can increasingly be delivered digitally, physical environments have a different job to do. They can offer discovery, service, community, interaction and experiences that are much harder to replicate through a screen.
One Sync response simply predicted a “shift to physical customer experience”. We suspect they may be onto something.
Are shopping agents really two years away?
We banned the two-letter acronym, but unsurprisingly its consequences still found their way into our wider conversations. In fact, one attendee predicted that agents will increasingly checkout on behalf of people within two years.
That might sound like the most futuristic response we received, but developments are moving quickly. In September, Adyen published its latest guidance on agentic commerce, reporting that agent-driven traffic is already converting at two to three times the rate of standard search traffic.
There is an important caveat. In the UK and Europe, the customer generally still needs to authorise the transaction, meaning the vision of an autonomous agent finding, selecting and purchasing something without human confirmation isn’t quite the reality yet.
But the direction of travel raises much bigger questions for commerce businesses. If customers increasingly delegate parts of discovery, comparison and eventually purchasing, retailers may need to optimise not only for the person buying the product, but for the systems acting on that person’s behalf.
Product information, availability, pricing, payments and data infrastructure all become even more important in that world.
And perhaps the human element matters more, not less
One of our favourite responses was also one of the simplest: human influence. As commerce becomes more automated and technology increasingly mediates the customer journey, understanding the person at the other end becomes more important, not less.
That could explain why so many of the other answers ultimately come back to customer experience.
Personalisation is about relevance to a person. Physical retail is about creating an experience for them. Unified commerce is about removing the frustration they encounter between channels. Instant returns are about making their lives easier. Even agent-led commerce ultimately depends on whether people trust technology enough to hand over part of the buying journey.
The technology may keep changing. Human expectations remain at the centre of it.
Final thoughts
Conversations in the room from one event certainly aren’t enough to predict the future of commerce. But they did give us an interesting snapshot of what people working in the industry are thinking about right now, particularly when the most obvious answer was deliberately taken away.
And when we look at what has been happening across retail more widely over the past few weeks, many of those predictions don’t feel particularly far-fetched.
What stood out wasn’t one breakthrough technology. It was the desire to make commerce more connected, more personal and, perhaps surprisingly, more human.
The next stage of commerce may involve increasingly sophisticated technology behind the scenes, but the businesses that get the most from it will still need to answer a much simpler question: does this actually make the experience better for the customer?
The event, run by the team at Visualsoft, was a great opportunity to get our heads up and out of the day job for a while, hear what others across the industry are seeing and thinking, and have some genuinely interesting conversations about where commerce is heading next.
There was plenty to take away from the sessions themselves, but just as much value in the conversations happening around them. A big thank you to the Visualsoft team for bringing everyone together, and to everyone who stopped by to share their hot take with us.
We suspect we’ll be revisiting a few of those predictions sooner than we think.
