Three retail tech trends to watch in 2026 – a mid-year update

It’s time to check in on the atate of agentic AI, workforce augmentation and ultrafast delivery.

In my first column of 2026 (posted Jan. 2), I analyzed three retail technology trends I said bore watching during the year – agentic AI, ultra-fast delivery, and workforce augmentation.

[READ MORE: Three retail tech trends to watch in 2026]

Now that we are at the halfway point of the year, I thought it would be worthwhile to look at how these trends have unfolded so far. If nothing else, all have had some interesting developments in the past six months:

Agentic AI

In my most recent year-end Retail Insights column, I called 2025 the year Agentic AI broke in retail and said in 2026 the technology would become a “universal feature” of retail solutions. 

Agentic AI builds upon the prescriptive capabilities of generative AI to streamline enterprise workflows even further by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results.

We may not be quite at the point where agentic AI is assumed, but it is omnipresent in the retail enterprise. In January, Google released its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for agentic AI-based commerce intended to cover the entire shopping journey from discovery and buying to post-purchase support and has rolled out several updates since.

Retailers have been embracing UCP, which enables activities such as search, checkout and payment within the Google Gemini agentic AI platform. Many retailers have also introduced search, checkout and payment within popular agentic environments such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

But agentic AI is also increasingly embedded in solutions that help retailers perform tasks as diverse as customer help center, quality inspection, recruitment/onboarding/training, and in-store clienteling.

However they choose to integrate agentic AI into their enterprise, retailers should remember to keep “humans in the loop” and not turn over mission-critical tasks or processes requiring complex judgment to machines without human supervision and input.

Ultra-fast delivery

In my January column, I said ultra-fast delivery would be major retail trend this year, with retailers providing delivery falling into the categories of the “quick and the dead.” And the two biggest U.S. retailers have both taken major steps in the six months since to gain yet another competitive edge by being quicker with delivery.

Amazon Now, which delivers thousands of items including household essentials, personal consumer electronics and groceries to customers’ doorsteps in about 30 minutes or less, is available in dozens of U.S. cities and will be rolled out to millions of customers across the country by year’s end.

Meanwhile, Walmart is supporting delivery in 30 minutes or less with a rapidly expanding drone delivery program (of course, Amazon is an early drone delivery pioneer). The discounter expects to have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations operational by 2027. The network will stretch from Los Angeles to Miami and service about 40 million U.S. consumers.

While not every retailer can offer ultra-fast delivery, all retailers looking to wind up on the quick side of the delivery equation need to offer delivery in as compressed a time period as possible. Tools to help achieve this goal include collaborating with third-party delivery platforms (some of which can deliver in as little as 15 minutes or even less), use local brick-and-mortar stores as delivery stations, and leverage dark stores that only serve personnel helping fulfill delivery orders.

Workforce augmentation

At the beginning of the year, I said in 2026 retailers will “continue utilizing solutions such as AI, automation and mobile apps to help employees accomplish more work, more accurately and more efficiently.”

A lot has happened in the workforce augmentation space since then. Kohl’s is piloting an AI analytics tool running on Google Cloud conversational analytics in the Google Looker reporting/dashboard tool for visualizing and reporting on that data. 

With the tool, associates can ask straightforward questions to compare product trends by category or brand or better understand what may be driving sales, without needing to pull multiple reports or manually compile data. 

Robots can also serve as a tool for retailers to increase employee effectiveness. Regional Midwest supermarket retailer B&R Stores is deploying the Simbe store intelligence platform and Tally autonomous shelf-scanning robot at select locations to scan and record real-time, shelf-level data on product availability, pricing, and placement. 

According to B&R, store associates will typically spend up to 30 hours per week on manual inventory tasks which are time-consuming, error-prone and consistently cited as a top driver of attrition. Tally automates those tasks, freeing associates to focus on higher-level replenishment, store execution and customer service workflows.

However, not every workforce augmentation technology rollout is guaranteed to succeed. Starbucks has reportedly put an end to providing employees with a mobile artificial intelligence solution that automated in-store inventory counting in favor of manual employee inventory counts to standardize the process and ensure consistency.