Retail Agent Con 2026 is not a real event. Not yet, anyway.
But here's the thing: every technology, company, framework, and trend on that page is completely real. The only fictional part was putting them all in one conference room. Give it another year or two and someone probably will.
Agentic commerce was the dominant theme at NRF 2026, Shoptalk, and EuroShop this year. Amazon and Walmart are building competing agent ecosystems. Google and OpenAI are battling over commerce protocols. And the open-source agent community (OpenClaw, Moltbook) is growing fast enough that Meta acquired one of them.
IHL Group tracks all of this through our research, our AI Retail Pulse webinar series, and our weekly Retail Reality Check newsletter. If you want the real analysis of how AI agents are reshaping retail and hospitality, without the fake trade show, we've got you covered.
And if we're being honest, a trade show built by agents for agents is probably only about 18 months away. When it happens, remember: you read it here first.