There’s an exponential shift in global apparel commerce. I’ve witnessed the change first hand, walking the floor of New York City’s stores, and experienced the sheer scale of it while attending ‘Retail’s Big Show’ put on by the National Retail Federation, the world's largest retail trade association, in the Big Apple.
James Townsend, co-founder and CEO of Pattern. Image supplied
One theme stood out above all others: the death of the linear paradigm. For decades, retailers have operated within a predictable ‘browse and buy’ funnel. But that world is gone.
We have entered an exponential era driven by machine intelligence that doesn't just suggest but reasons and acts.
For fashion executives across Africa, the message is clear: retail is moving from a tool-based approach to an ecosystem where AI is the infrastructure. We are entering the age of the ‘Sentient Store’.
Here are the four forces redefining fashion retail in 2026.
1. From SEO to GEO: The rise of agentic commerce
The traditional search engine is no longer the ‘front door’ of the internet. We are rapidly moving from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Success is no longer about being found through keywords; it is about being chosen by an algorithm in the right context.
McKinsey projects that agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents transact on behalf of consumers, could be worth up to $5tn by 2030. Today, nearly a quarter of global consumers already rely on generative AI as their main starting point when shopping.
Soon, personal agents will understand the nuances of human needs, sifting through hundreds of sites in seconds to execute a purchase based on specific cultural or economic criteria. If your brand isn’t visible to the LLM crawlers, you simply don’t exist.
2. The ‘DeepSeek’ moment and perpetual commerce
The global retail playbook, once written in the West and exported East, has inverted. China is now re-architecting how goods are sold through what I call Reverse Innovation 2.0.
The efficiency of this model is staggering. JD Cloud’s "Yanxi" platform reports that virtual AI hosts cost one-tenth as much as a human host and maintain peak energy 24/7.
In mid-2025, we saw AI avatars generate over $7.6m in a single seven-hour session, outperforming their human counterparts. This is "perpetual commerce": predictive, personalised, and perpetually "on". For global brands, the question is no longer whether to adopt this, but how quickly to integrate it to protect margins against competitors who never sleep.
3. Invisible AI: Frictionless as the new standard
Consumers are reaching a point where they don’t care how AI is used, as long as it delivers value and transparency. We are moving toward Ambient AI, where intelligence quietly surrounds the customer, anticipating intent before it is even expressed.
According to Capgemini, 71% of consumers now want Gen AI-integrated shopping interactions, up from 56% just a year ago. However, trust is the new profit driver. 52% of shoppers say they will switch retailers for better data protection policies.
AI shouldn’t be the hero; the consumer should be. The most successful applications in 2026 are ‘invisible’—using visual AI to monitor self-checkouts to detect friction or using digital twins to reduce physical sampling.
4. Material disruption and the quality pivot
As the ‘throwaway’ culture of fast fashion faces mounting regulatory and consumer scrutiny, a new winner has emerged: the fabric-first engineering model. Uniqlo’s ascent to becoming the world's third-largest fashion group is a masterclass in branded innovation.
While competitors race to compress design cycles, the winners in 2026 are investing in material science. By branding the innovation, think HEATTECH or AIRism, retailers render the competition irrelevant.
This strategy requires a level of corporate patience rarely seen in public markets, but with revenue surging nearly 15% in a flat market, the results speak for themselves. The value proposition is shifting from fleeting desire to functional necessity.
Engineering the exponential future
Retail is changing faster than ever, but the goal remains the same: solving problems for people.
To compete with the giants already investing heavily in agentic AI and sentient ecosystems, we must dismantle our legacy ‘spaghetti’ architectures and tool our teams for speed.
The exponential shift is here. Those who embrace the agentic, the sentient, and the material-first will define the next decade of fashion.
