AI spending is forecast to reach $40.74 billion by 2030.
While AI adoption is accelerating on both sides of the Atlantic, UK and US retailers are taking differing approaches. US organizations are using AI to unlock new revenue opportunities and reshape the customer experience. UK retailers have largely focused on what AI can do internally.
VP of Market Strategy at Commerce.
There are understandable reasons for the differing approaches. But UK retailers risk falling behind if they don’t broaden their strategy to focus on embedding AI across the full customer journey.
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The Transatlantic AI divide: Operational efficiency vs revenue growth
For UK retailers, early AI adoption has been cautious. The focus has been on internal operational efficiencies, such as creating marketing content, handling surface-level customer service and answering post-purchase queries.
US retailers, on the other hand, are embedding AI directly into the shopping journey itself. A third of US adults now use AI agents when shopping online, such as Amazon’s Rufus, to discover or research products. In-chat checkout experiences are becoming increasingly popular. US retailers are positioning AI more like a digital sales assistant than a back-office tool.
While both approaches have their merits, there is a risk UK retailers get left behind. The gap won’t happen overnight. It will emerge quietly, starting with share of attention and then showing up in revenue.
Global retailers using AI for discovery, conversion, and lifetime value will start owning key decision moments. UK brands focused on operational efficiency may find themselves absent from the journeys that matter most.
Compliance vs experimentation
UK retailers didn’t arrive at caution arbitrarily. Regulation and the consumer expectations shaped it. GDPR means shoppers expect clear consent, transparency on data use, and control before engaging with AI-driven experiences.
That’s why many UK retailers started with safer operational use cases, including automating support, enhancing content and streamlining fulfilment, before fully reinventing the ecommerce journey. Explainability and trust came before experimentation.
In the US, fewer regulatory guardrails made it easier for retailers to test AI tools publicly, iterate quickly and showcase value directly to consumers. The UK’s position isn’t a weakness. It’s a different starting point.
By ensuring customer-facing AI functions are both compliant and secure, UK retailers can both unlock new revenue and strengthen consumer confidence, rather than risking the need to roll back features due to compliance concerns.
Turning AI into a commercial growth engine
The faster US adoption has been less about technology and more about how the internal conversation is framed. The boardroom conversation isn’t “How do we save cost?” — it’s “How do we acquire smarter, convert faster and grow lifetime value?”.
US retailers treat AI as a growth lever across the full customer journey, from personalizing discovery and optimizing pricing, to guiding promotions, streamlining checkout and automating lifecycle communications. AI is framed as a revenue driver, not an operational nicety.
UK retailers have strong operational foundations. The shift is about pointing that discipline toward growth, opt-in recommendations and assisted checkouts. Controlled experiments that build insight and customer confidence at the same time.
For these experiments to work, the product data underneath them has to be ready: rich specifications, reviews, imagery and supporting content that gives AI something real to reference during conversational discovery and search.
Predictive personalization can prioritize high-value customers and surface relevant offers. Controlled agentic shopping experiences build familiarity and insight over time. Dynamic pricing and AI-driven lifecycle communications improve both conversion and retention. None of this requires abandoning the trust UK retailers have built.
The risk of falling behind may be gradual, but it is real
UK retail has the foundations. Now they need to be built upon.
Customer acquisition costs will rise if competitors are winning the discovery moment first. Conversions will happen earlier – and elsewhere – if the journey isn’t being shaped. Lifetime value will lag as AI-driven retention compounds faster for the brands that moved sooner.
Cumulative gaps are harder to close than visible ones. The retailers that combine strong governance and trusted data practices with genuine customer-facing AI innovation are the ones that will compete well in what comes next.
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