Retail’s Big Show, the NRF’s annual flagship event in New York City earlier this week, is where you go for a sense of what’s happening within retail writ large, beyond the data-driven advertising corner of the universe we normally focus on.
This was only my second Big Show, so I can’t judge much in terms of historical change. However, a few things did strike me about the 2026 event, even compared to just a year ago.
Hello, influencers
Influencers often refer to themselves a “creators.” Sometimes, retailers will use a more ambiguous “community” framing or even “talent relations.” The most unabashed will speak openly of a social affiliate network.
But call them what you like, social influencers had a major presence this year.
Walmart, for example, sent Sarah Henry, its VP of content, influencer and commerce, to discuss the retailer’s creator programs.
Pacsun, meanwhile, took the opportunity to announce its “PS Community Hub,” a new app that’s part shopping marketplace and part social influencer affiliate portal.
Companies like Uber, Shopify and Instacart now show up at the Big Show as sponsors and exhibitors, while influencers tag along with the big platform players, which, in turn, are trying to sell social audience extensions to marketers.
And retailers and Amazon merchants discussed on stage how they’ve recently leaned into influencer marketing, One session, featuring Crocs and Tarte Cosmetics, was called “Think like a marketer, act like a creator,” while Walmart, H&M and American Eagle appeared on a panel entitled “Retail creators: Culture that converts”.
In the US market, TikTok and Instagram still aren’t the kind of direct-shopping platforms that we’ve seen thrive in China. But retailers and omnichannel sellers are adapting, using those platforms to stand up affiliate programs or maintain more always-on relationships with creators, rather than treating influencers as a one-off addition to a marketing campaign.
No ‘retail’ without “AI”
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But influencers weren’t the only big thing at the Big Show.
Perhaps you’ve heard of agentic AI?
AI is not just a trend or buzzword. As your reporter on-the-ground, my read is that there’s a genuine sense of interest – even from people who don’t have something to sell. In other words, this isn’t like the blockchain or Web3 hype cycles of the past, when most of the people being pitched had hit the mental snooze button and clearly didn’t expect to ever need to understand how on-chain transactions or whatever actually work.
This new urgency – and you might even call it anxiety – is, I think, being amplified by the complex and constantly evolving alliances and integrations among tech companies forming as a result of AI tech.
For example, Google and Shopify co-developed a new agentic framework for ecommerce, which they call the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). It’s backed by retailers including Walmart, Target, Etsy and Wayfair.
A couple of months ago, OpenAI debuted the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which it built with payment processor Stripe and since added PayPal.
These protocols integrate with many of the same retailers or Shopify merchants, and they’re all chasing the same goal, which is to consolidate around a single standards or at least as few as possible.
“You might wonder why we are introducing another protocol,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during his NRF keynote address this week.
Pichai seemed to anticipate the collective groan at yet another network and addition to the acronym soup.
There’s ACP and UCP, which are MCPs, not APIs, that are built on PCI-DSS standards and integrate with the PSPs.
Even for the programmatic space, it’s getting pretty out of hand.
Pichai justified Google and Shopify adding another to the growing list of agentic commerce protocols because “the industry needs a protocol that works at global scale and takes into account the nuances of commerce journeys.”
He framed those journeys as a “critical building block” for developing a universal standard. But make no mistake, this is Google planting a flag , asserting its right to establish said standard based on its global scale and understanding of the “nuances of commerce journeys,” as Pichai put it, in contrast to, ostensibly, OpenAI.
The concern among the retailers and marketers I spoke with about these agentic protocols is whether they can exist within walled gardens like Amazon and Google, which have what you might call a content fortress mentality.
Google describes its new protocol, UCP, as “agnostic” and “compatible” with many existing industry protocols. The blog post cites integrations with Agent2Agent, which is Google’s protocol for agentic engagements, as well as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol and the Model Context Protocol developed by Anthropic.
For many largish Shopify merchants or mid-size retailers, though, these high-level debates about protocols feel a bit removed from their day-to-day realities.
Their more immediate challenge right now is choosing between, say, Databricks or Snowflake, one AI vendor sales exec told me during the Big Show.
Disentangling the web of protocols and figuring out how, when and where these different frameworks all fit together, he added, “is a problem for, like, NRF Big Show 2028.”
