📍 Barcelona, ​​Spain 📅 June 9 to 11, 2026
From June 9 to 11, 2026, Shoptalk Europe 2026 will bring together several thousand leaders from commerce, luxury, consumer goods and technology at Fira Gran Via around a question that has become central to the entire sector: what commerce will look like when artificial intelligence is no longer just an optimization tool, but an active intermediary in the purchasing decision.
The 2026 edition marks a change of phase for the leading European retail event. The theme chosen this year, “Where AI and human ingenuity meet”, reflects a very clear evolution in the market. After several years of technological demonstrations and AI pilots, distributors and brands are now seeking to understand how to industrialize these uses without losing what still constitutes their differentiation: the brand, the experience, the emotion and the customer relationship.
This development is directly reflected in the conference agenda. A large part of the 2026 program is devoted to “agentic commerce”, a new paradigm in which AI agents become capable of searching for products, comparing offers, personalizing recommendations and automating purchasing actions in an almost autonomous manner.
One of the most anticipated sessions of this edition, “Agentic Commerce: What’s Here, Real, and Next?” ”, will open this reflection on Wednesday. The conference will notably bring together Dido Schmidt and Mark Elkins around a question that is beginning to cross the entire industry: what parts of the customer journey will remain controlled by brands when conversational interfaces and AI assistants become the main entry point for digital commerce.
Behind agentic commerce there is a potential redistribution of power in global e-commerce. Historically, brands have invested massively to master their digital interfaces, their SEO, their applications and their customer journeys. The emergence of AI agents could gradually shift this value to new layers of algorithmic intermediation.
This tension will be extended with the session “Getting Seen in the Age of AI Commerce”. Behind this title probably hides one of the most critical issues of the coming years for distributors and brands: how to remain visible in an environment where traditional search engines, marketplaces and even e-commerce sites risk being partially replaced by conversational interfaces driven by AI.
For marketing and e-commerce departments, this transformation could call into question several decades of practices linked to SEO, digital advertising and the optimization of user journeys. In a business driven by AI agents, the visibility of a brand will depend as much on the quality of its structured data, its content and its product infrastructures as on its traditional advertising investments.
But the 2026 agenda also shows that major retail groups do not only consider AI as a subject of automation. Several sessions reveal, on the contrary, an attempt to reinvest the physical store as an emotional and cultural space.
The conference “More Than a Store: Bringing the Brand to Life”, scheduled for Wednesday morning on the Woodstock Stage, illustrates this strategic shift. The session will notably bring together Dimas Gimeno, Sarah Clark and Shweta Munshi around the now central subject of how to transform stores into experiences capable of physically embodying the identity of a brand in an increasingly standardized commercial environment.
This problem goes far beyond simple “experiential retail”. As digital journeys become driven by AI systems capable of automatically comparing products or recommending alternatives, brands are seeking to preserve spaces where emotion, storytelling and physical experience remain levers of differentiation.
With representatives from lululemon, LEGO Group and WOW Concept, which are among the groups which have invested heavily in recent years in hybrid formats combining commerce, community, events and brand experience. In fact, the store is gradually once again becoming a media intended to reinforce desirability and emotional engagement in an environment where digital interfaces tend to homogenize the purchasing experience.
The conference “Transforming digital purchasing experiences through data and AI” will bring together Marta MartĂnez, Romain Roulleau and Julia Bösch around the concrete transformation of digital purchasing experiences. Behind the talk about generative AI, European groups are now seeking to measure uses that are truly capable of improving conversion rates, loyalty or operational productivity.
The “AI Powering Operational Excellence” session should focus discussions on the other side of the AI ​​revolution in retail: internal automation. Supply chain, inventory management, dynamic pricing, demand forecasts, customer support or merchandising are gradually becoming priority areas of application for large European retailers facing increasing pressure on margins.
The 2026 edition also confirms another change in the sector: commerce is gradually becoming an industry driven by data infrastructures. Conferences devoted to the preparation of AI architectures, retail media or even stores as media platforms show that the battle is no longer fought only on products or prices, but on the control of data flows, customer attention and algorithmic capabilities.
This development explains the presence of groups like Google, L’OrĂ©al, Mango, Kingfisher, Ikea, H&M Group and Tesco, all faced with the same problem: how to integrate AI as an operational layer without trivializing their customer relations or losing control of their distribution.
Like every year, Shoptalk will also retain its strongly transactional dimension. The Meetup program provides more than 20,000 pre-scheduled meetings between distributors, brands and technology suppliers. This networking mechanism constitutes one of the main economic drivers of the event and one of the reasons for its growing influence in the European trade ecosystem.
Essentially, Shoptalk Europe 2026 documents a deeper transformation that reveals the emergence of European commerce where artificial intelligence, media, data, logistics and customer experience gradually converge into the same operational infrastructure.
For the leaders present in Barcelona, ​​the question of how their companies will manage to maintain a distinctive identity, visibility and customer relations in an environment where AI agents gradually risk becoming the new intermediaries of global commerce.
