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From the 100,000-asset content machine at American Eagle to the governance conversation most brands are avoiding, our top takeaways from ShopTalk Spring 2026.
ShopTalk Spring 2026 brought 10,000+ attendees to the Mandalay Bay under the banner "Retail in the Age of AI." AI was in every session title, every hallway conversation, and every vendor pitch. But the conference's real throughline was less about AI itself and more about the gap between knowing that it matters and actually making it work.
That gap is quantifiable. According to Supermetrics' Marketing Data Report 2026, released the same week as ShopTalk, only 8% of ecommerce brands currently use AI for campaign optimization, despite 70% identifying it as a top priority.
That's not a technology problem. That's an execution problem. And it was the defining tension of the entire event.
Here's what stood out to us from our week in Vegas.
This has been the theme of early 2026 (see last month’s eTail Palm Springs coverage). Everyone’s officially past asking whether or not to invest in AI. The question is now why so many AI initiatives aren't delivering results proportionate to the investment, and what the brands pulling away are doing differently.
At ShopTalk, that shift showed up everywhere. Shopify launched agentic storefronts. Google unveiled its Business Agent AI. Meta introduced real-time AI creative personalization for Advantage+ campaigns. AI isn't an add-on anymore. It's being built into the core infrastructure of the platforms you're already paying for, which means AI readiness is no longer optional for the teams using them.
Brooklinen CEO Billy May made this point directly in his session on breakthrough growth: the biggest barrier isn't technology or budget. It's institutional inertia. The willingness to rebuild workflows around what AI makes possible, rather than layering it onto processes designed for a different era, is what separates the brands pulling ahead.
Adobe's Bruce Richards offered CMOs a useful diagnostic starting point: "What AI initiative could save 50% right away?" followed by "What governance is needed to keep AI initiatives on-brand?" Those two questions are worth more than most vendor pitches, because they force a conversation about infrastructure before ambition.
Governance surfaced across the conference, not just in sessions explicitly focused on risk and compliance, but in the way brands talked about trust, brand control, and consumer perception throughout the week.
The data framed the urgency. Original research from Deloitte Digital, eMarketer, and Merkle showed that 57% of consumers express concern about AI-generated fake ads, while only 37% of marketers include AI governance clauses in vendor contracts (IAB State of Data 2026). Consumers are understandably worried about AI-generated content. The majority of brands buying AI tools haven't even written governance into the contract.
Fashionphile CIO Rebecca Maffei and independent analyst Rick Watson (RMW Commerce Consulting) went deeper on the operational side, walking through how organizations can scale AI adoption without exposing themselves to unnecessary operational, legal, or reputational risk. Watson's framing carried particular weight: governance isn't a brake on AI adoption. It's what makes confident scaling possible.
If you're evaluating AI marketing platforms right now, the governance question isn't a nice-to-have. It's a deal requirement. The organizations that build brand control and approval workflows into their creative production systems now will be scaling confidently while competitors are still writing policies after the fact.
If there was one session that resonated with us, it was the conversation between American Eagle VP of Marketing, Media, Performance and Engagement Ashley Schapiro and Wayfair CMO Paul Toms on building social media strategies at scale. Schapiro described her team's content reality: approximately 100,000 pieces of content, 2,500 net new media assets, multiple posts per day across every platform.
And that's before creators, influencers, and iteration.
If you're running performance marketing at enterprise scale, these numbers are no longer anomalies. They're the volume required to maintain presence across every platform, audience segment, and product line that matters. And they represent the challenge most enterprise teams are still facing. Few have built the creative infrastructure to support it.
The takeaway isn't just that brands need more content. It's that the creative production infrastructure at most organizations was built for a volume reality that no longer exists. The gap between what your marketing organization needs to produce and what your current systems can support is widening, not narrowing.
And as that volume grows, so does the risk of brand dilution. The organizations maintaining brand consistency at scale are doing it through systems, not willpower.
Brand evolution and creative scale aren't separate workstreams. They're one and the same.
Personalization has been "the next big thing" in marketing for as long as most of us have been in the industry. What made ShopTalk feel different is that the brands on stage weren't talking about personalization as an aspiration. They were talking about the infrastructure required to actually do it.
Gap Inc. CTO Sven Gerjets described a three-tiered AI approach alongside Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal: 1) Enable - get every employee treating AI as a companion, not a tool, 2) Optimize - improve existing processes, and 3) Reinvent - ask which tasks AI should handle entirely. Concretely, that looks like partnerships with Bold Metrics for AI-powered fit recommendations and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol for conversational shopping.
Madrigal pointed to where discovery itself is heading: Pinterest is using visual signals and behavioral patterns to anticipate preferences before a customer can even articulate them. 39% of Gen Z now use Pinterest before they turn to Google.
Lowe's SVP of Digital Commerce Joe Cano shared the company’s plans to roll out a fully personalized website experience to all customers by the end of 2026, using modular content blocks that adapt to individual browsing behavior. Early tests are already showing engagement and conversion improvements.
The pattern across these sessions was consistent: personalization gains aren't coming from the most sophisticated models. They're coming from the cleanest data. That tracks with everything we've seen working with enterprise brands: personalization compounds only when your data foundation is solid.
A year ago, the conference conversation was still focused on when was the right time to start dabbling in AI. At ShopTalk 2026, there were entire sessions dedicated to helping buyers build frameworks for evaluating AI marketing tools. The buying motion is real, and it's happening now.
But the most useful guidance on what to actually look for came from the brands doing the evaluating themselves. In a rapid-fire session moderated by Anne Mezzenga (Retail Field Report), Boll & Branch CCO Katia Unlu, David Yurman CTO Christian Fortucci, and KHAITE CTO Alex Richardson shared where they'd place their next AI bets.
Three luxury and premium DTC brands evaluating AI investments in real time. The takeaways were pointed: AI delivers real value in operations and customer care, but is still risky in storytelling and high-touch moments. Brand trust still comes down to accuracy and a consistent, authentic voice. And the biggest opportunity isn't more tools. It's using existing data better.
The through-line: "Don't lead with AI. Lead with extraordinary experiences."
Many of the conference’s most compelling sessions made the business argument for brand investment with hard numbers to back it up.
Victoria's Secret CEO Hillary Super detailed the company's transformation from "prescriptive sexiness" to "sexiness on your terms." The results: FY 2025 revenue of $6.55 billion (up 5% year-over-year), stock up 63% YoY. Unlike the recent turnaround success of David's Bridal, Victoria's Secret's turnaround wasn't primarily technology-led. It was brand-led, with operational discipline behind it.
Super's key hire? A CFO who believed in brand investment rather than treating marketing as a cost center.
New Balance CEO Joe Preston delivered a similarly compelling case. The company has achieved 180% growth over five years through unwavering premium pricing and an anti-discounting philosophy. Eighty stores opened in 2025 alone, including a 150,000 square foot Chicago flagship, with a five-to-seven-year real estate pipeline already in place.
Clinique SVP of Global Marketing Christie Sclater, Papa Johns' Shivram Vaideeswaran, and Coppel's Gloria Canales discussed reinventing brands for the next generation without losing what made them household names.
Coach/Tapestry SVP Jennifer Yue and Crocs CMO Carly Gomez explored reaching Gen Z and Gen Alpha, a generation where 78% prefer creator-driven content over studio content and brand authenticity is the price of entry.
And Christine Barone, CEO of Dutch Bros, spoke extensively about how the company has grown to become the third-largest coffee chain in the country by prioritizing the people that they hire over the systems that they’ve built, summarizing the point cleanly: “We sell emotion, not coffee.”
Every one of these brands made a bet that investing in identity would outperform optimizing for efficiency. In a landscape where AI can generate content for any brand in any category, the companies with the clearest point of view are the ones that cut through.
Brand has always been a compounding asset. AI just raised the rate of return.
We're at a strange point in the AI adoption curve. For many consumers, moments of genuine human connection with a brand feel more like the exception than the rule.
There's no question that consumers remain skeptical about AI in advertising. In the best scenarios, AI is enabling brands to do more than they could previously. But some conversations at ShopTalk highlighted the places where we're losing the human connection for the sake of efficiency.
Are we hurtling toward a future where everyone outsources their purchasing decisions to their personal AI shopper agent? Will your next brand ambassador be AI?
We believe the choice between AI adoption and human connection is a false one. And no presentation demonstrated that balance better than Macy's closing day keynote.
Max Magni (Chief Customer and Digital Officer) and Barbie Cameron (Chief Stores Officer) unveiled "Ask Macy's," the brand's new AI shopping assistant powered by Google's Gemini. The tool invites customers to describe what they're looking for "like you would a store colleague." Its most popular features are "Complete the Look," which recommends accessories to match an outfit, and virtual try-on, which lets shoppers preview how items look on them.
In stores, Cameron shared that associates have already started using the virtual try-on feature for customers who don't have time to physically try things on, extending the tool's utility to human-led conversations rather than replacing them.
The development process reflected the philosophy. Thousands of Macy's employees helped refine the tool before launch. Early versions were too mechanical. When Magni asked for T-shirt suggestions for his son, the bot returned a flat list: "Here's a T-shirt for a 10-year-old." After iteration, the same query now gets: "Ten-year-olds can have so much fun with color. Do you want a brighter or more muted color selection?" The difference is the difference between a search engine and a colleague.
The framing was deliberate throughout: the customer always makes the decision. Magni's line captured it: "We are not in the business of transacting, but for moments that matter." Customers who use the tool spend 4.75x more than those who don't, not because AI pushed them to buy more, but because better discovery led to more confident purchases.
The implication goes beyond "let AI handle volume so your team can focus on what matters." It's that the brands who built their systems around transaction efficiency for the last decade have an opportunity to rebuild them around connection. If the old infrastructure wasn't keeping up anyway, as every session at ShopTalk made clear, then the rebuild isn't just a technology upgrade. It's a chance to redesign for the customer relationship you actually want: one where AI makes the experience feel more human, not less.
More sessions about AI than any prior ShopTalk. More proof that AI-powered marketing delivers measurably better results. And yet only 8% of ecommerce brands are doing it.
That gap defined ShopTalk 2026. Not a gap in awareness or ambition. A gap in execution. The brands pulling away are the ones that invested in creative production infrastructure, brand governance, and cross-functional workflows before it was comfortable. They're producing at the volume performance marketing demands. They're scaling AI without eroding the brand trust they spent years building. And they're using this moment to redesign their systems around the customer relationships they actually want, not just the transactions they can measure.
That's where the work is. It's also the set of challenges Adora was built to solve. If your team is navigating this heading into the rest of 2026, let's chat.
A few of our favorite ShopTalk Spring 2026 recaps from across the industry:
