Ahead of our Retail Media Impact Summit, taking place on 7th October in Amsterdam, we caught up with James Taylor, Founder & CEO of Particular Audience, to hear more about his upcoming interactive session, Crowdsourcing the Future: The AI in Retail Media Town Hall.
AI is quickly becoming one of the most important topics in Retail and Commerce Media, but adoption looks different across the ecosystem. For some, AI is already embedded in workflows and decision-making. For others, the opportunity is still emerging.
In this interactive town hall, James will lead a topic-by-topic briefing with active audience participation and polling throughout, giving attendees a live view of where AI adoption in Retail Media really stands today, where the biggest opportunities are emerging, and where the industry still needs more clarity.
“Because AI is changing both how Retail Media operates and where commerce happens. It can already automate campaign creation, targeting, optimisation and measurement. More fundamentally, AI assistants are becoming a new surface for product discovery. When a shopper asks for “the best moisturiser for sensitive skin under €30”, the first shelf they see may be assembled outside the retailer’s website.
That creates a strategic question: who controls the intelligence deciding which products are eligible, relevant and commercially appropriate? Retailers cannot simply expose a catalogue and hope for the best. They need an agent-ready decision layer that preserves their control over the customer experience and commercial model. More AI is not automatically progress; better decisions are. Retailer profit and longevity depend upon it.”
“The audience will effectively create a live piece of industry research. We will examine AI topic by topic: what is genuinely in production, what remains experimental, where measurable value is appearing and which barriers are proving hardest to overcome.
I also want to distinguish between three very different levels of adoption: AI assisting people, AI making commercial decisions, and retailers becoming ready to serve external shopping agents. Anonymous polling should help us get beneath the polished case studies and reveal what organisations are actually prepared to deploy. With retailers, brands, agencies and technology providers together, we should also expose where their expectations align—and where they emphatically do not.”
“My hypothesis is that adoption is widespread, but maturity is not. AI is already common in content generation, reporting, campaign operations and analysis. It is less often trusted with consequential decisions involving product ranking, budgets, pricing or incrementality, and few retailers are genuinely architected for agentic commerce.
Many businesses have accumulated AI-powered point solutions while their search, personalisation, merchandising and Retail Media systems continue to make conflicting decisions. What is a retailer’s first and last port-of-call for an AI agent? The real measure of maturity is not how many AI tools an organisation uses. Beyond relevance, it is whether its data, decisioning and measurement work coherently, and whether humans can understand and govern the outcomes. I am interested to see whether the room confirms or dismantles that view.”
“The quickest wins are operational: building campaigns, selecting products, targeting audiences, pacing budgets, forecasting revenue, reconciling payments and explaining performance. These are expensive, repetitive activities in far too many Retail Media networks.
The larger opportunity is using AI to coordinate decisions that are currently made separately across teams and functions; for example, organic ranking, sponsored products, personalisation and promotions ought to be unified and socially aware. For retailers, this can improve relevance, yield and profitability without degrading the customer experience. For brands and agencies, it can allocate investment against incremental outcomes rather than convenient proxies. For technology partners, the challenge is making fragmented systems interoperable and accountable.
Agentic commerce then extends that intelligence beyond the retailer’s own channels, allowing assistants to discover and recommend products through governed interfaces rather than an uncontrolled catalogue feed. Important to get one's house in order first; signals and transformer search are the foundation, or retailers will fail this test and, by extension, so too will their brands.
Brands must understand and influence retailer algorithms in order to get ahead and exploit the algorithmic shelf.”
“The first chapter of Retail Media was about making the digital shelf auctionable and capturing brand budgets. The next must connect media investment with the wider commercial decisions that determine what actually sells (commercial outcomes): relevance, merchandising, price, margin and inventory. AI now makes it possible to coordinate those decisions in real time.
At Particular Audience, we are defining the continued convergence of trade and Retail Media as Trade Media. Its emerging format is Sponsored Promotions: Sponsored Products monetise the shelf; Sponsored Promotions monetise the price.
Particular Audience is building the operating layer between paid media and trade investment. Supplier-funded, self-service Sponsored Products are now an accepted standard; we believe supplier-funded, self-service promotions will become just as common, giving brands comparable control, precision and measurement when funding price interventions.
Our base-case analysis estimates that over 60% of 2025 Retail Media spending originated in trade budgets, yet the wider trade-investment pool remains roughly four times larger. Pricing and promotions represent a substantial part of that pool and are the next commercial decisions to become programmable.
I am most looking forward to testing that thesis with the room in real time. A town hall can reveal disagreement and unexpected patterns that a conventional presentation politely conceals, which should make Amsterdam unusually useful, and possibly slightly dangerous.”
Hear more from James Taylor and other senior leaders at IAB Europe’s Retail Media Impact Summit, taking place on 7th October in Amsterdam.
Under the theme Beyond the Boom: The Next Chapter of Retail Media Growth, the Summit will bring together retailers, brands, agencies, Retail Media Networks, technology partners and industry leaders to explore the priorities defining the next phase of Retail and Commerce Media in Europe.
