ShopAble in the Park 2025: GenAI’s Role in Commerce Media

ShopAble in the Park 2025 brought the energy of Skai’s flagship US event to London. This reimagined, festival-style gathering of commerce media leaders took place at Shoreditch Gardens, delivering fresh ideas, industry-shaping conversations, and plenty of inspiration. With topics spanning AI, omnichannel strategy, and the future of retail media, ShopAble in the Park marked a pivotal moment for the UK commerce media community.

GenAI is transforming how we win in commerce media. As the path to purchase collapses and AI agents become shopping guides, marketers must rethink everything from audience strategy to measurement frameworks. The brands that will succeed are those that become “AI recommendable” while maintaining the human insight needed to guide these powerful new tools.

Recently, the conversation around GenAI in commerce media has moved beyond theoretical possibilities to practical implementation. With AI rapidly collapsing the funnel and reshaping how consumers discover and purchase products, this panel tackled one of the most pressing questions facing marketers today: how do we win when the assistant makes the recommendations?

At ShopAble in the Park, Host Matt Vignieri, Chief Growth Officer at Skai, set the stage by asking ChatGPT how the panel would go, a fitting start for a discussion about AI’s role in our industry. The AI’s prediction? “Keep it Skai style: substance over sizzle.”

Panelists: 

• Bethany Mercer, Retail Media Strategy Director, Croud
• Marcos Angelides, MD L’Oréal Lab and Head of AI Operations, Publicis Media
• Matt Carter, Head of Industry Strategy for Advertising, AWS
• Tracey Pilon, EMEA AI in Ads Director, Microsoft AI

What does the new GenAI-powered buyer journey look like?

Angelides: “AI and GenAI are going to have such a huge impact on this, particularly in the middle of the shopping journey, we will outsource more and more of our shopping decisions to agents to do it for us primarily because it saves time and it’s useful and it helps.

“The human, though, us real people, will still be in charge of the two ends of it. Brand building is going to be even more important than ever before, doing that inspiration early on that fuels them. The brief that you give the agents is key, and brand is a shortcut through the shopping journey.”

Carter: “I think it’s coming soon. I saw a demo yesterday of someone using Claude to do their Tesco shopping, to buy roast dinner and build an agent system to do all of their ordering. So that’s live, that’s happening now.

“I think perhaps for our generation, that kind of big screen purchase and the caution around letting AI click to buy is definitely real. But I think for the younger generations, my son who’s 13 is probably very happy just to load up my credit card details and get AI to click to buy.”

Pilon: “It definitely has to start with the permission, and it starts with the AI agent that you’re using to really understand who you are as a person, what you buy, how often you buy it, and your budget.

“Not one of us on this panel today is shopping in exactly the same way. And although we kind of get scared that these autonomous agents are going to make decisions on behalf of us, they’re learning those decisions based on our behaviors.”

How do brands influence product discovery when GenAI becomes the guide?

Mercer: “The influence really shifts from that direct advertising and into teaching these machines about our brands, and it is about becoming AI recommendable. So over 60% now, I think trust what these machines have to say about brands and products.

“The structured data is that sort of real, tangible product information. But at the moment, AI doesn’t possess the ability to feel. So it’s that feeling and the emotion and the consumer sentiment comes from those reviews and that user-generated content.”

Angelides: “You might say, help me organize my groceries for the week. I need to save money, I need to cut 10 pounds, help me find offers. But when it comes to chocolates, it’s got to be Cadbury’s. I won’t sacrifice. That’s the brand I love. I won’t have anything else. So brand becomes the key towards the shopping cycle.”

Carter: “Your AI is only as good as the data infrastructure that you feed it. And so many people fall short of that. If you want a fully autonomous comms planning to content solution, you have to make sure that all of your retail media, all of the wider signals are based on a cloud.”

What role does the brand play when AI makes recommendations?

Pilon: “Brands have a huge opportunity to still play a pivotal role in how you show up in this new future. When we actually look at conversations that have been co-pilot-driven, we do see that click-through rate increases by 73%. We see that conversions increase by 25%, we see that purchases increased by 56% and if there’s a shopping intent, that goes up to 194%.

“It is discovery-led. It’s not necessarily brand-led… unless they are already a loyal customer and an advocate of your brand, they are going to be in what we call discovery-led. The funnel is compressed because I’m doing consideration, I’m doing awareness, I’m doing research, and I actually want to buy.”

Angelides: “The role of media is to not just turn up in different points or know when to turn up, but to know who to turn up for. Whether it’s the human at the start that needs inspiration, whether it’s the AI in the middle that’s shortlisting and curating, or it’s the person again at the end that needs performance marketing to give them confidence on what they’re buying.”

Mercer: “The brands that will really win long-term here are the ones that will be very articulate with data, very transparent with data, and really fostering that genuine consumer feedback loop to be able to future-proof how they show up on AI.”

Do media teams need to rethink their strategy for AI-mediated commerce?

Carter: “We are witnessing the evolution from conversational AI to commercial AI right now. And I think the brands and the agencies and the tech platforms who are winning at this, they’re not just thinking smarter or optimizing faster, and they’re fundamentally thinking in a different way.

“Media planning teams and content teams need to be prompt engineering to ensure that when the AI detects all those commercial signals, it’s able to deliver the right strategy, the right message, the right creative, the right narrative, the right price point, the right format.”

Angelides: “I think there are huge opportunities for AI to be used in creative capacities. I think it’s a wonderful sounding board to bounce ideas off. There’s a lot that can be done around customer data and building personas, and giving a voice to customers inside the business.”

Pilon: “AI wants to do a good job. It really does. It wants to get an A star. And the only way it does that is by being able to look at the information and quickly scan it in a millisecond and understand how to take things like ratings, how to take reviews, how to take your policies, all the things that it’s going to take and deem relevant.”

Where should advertisers place their bets in this new landscape?

Angelides: “All of it is the answer. I mean, to be honest, the simplest answer is that we have no idea is the true answer in terms of how early on we still are with the AI journey… The reality is it all has to come back to measurement because the rate of change is going on so quickly.

“The businesses that will win will measure quickest. The way to measure quickest is to have a really good partnership network around you. When you’ve got brilliant partners, when you’ve got brilliant agencies, when you’ve got brilliant tech platforms and groups that you can pull together in a confidential way, but that allows you to share learnings, your rate of measurement goes through the roof.”

Pilon: “When you think about the agentic future and how you might want to think about the measurement in terms of impact, because it certainly might not be the click, in fact, it won’t. So if you think about the number of conversations, if you think about the time, if you think about how quickly you’re able to answer the question, there’s also a lot of power in how the insights those conversations actually drive.”

Carter: “Stop thinking about AI as a future strategy and start making sure that your data foundations are correct now. The most important thing is to get your data foundations right. Your AI is only as good as the data infrastructure that you feed it.”

Mercer: “I think it has the propensity to do both faster and better. But it still relies on massive human critical oversight. We can’t just blindly follow the ChatGPT sat nav without considering whether the road ahead is closed.”

Key Takeaways for Marketers

GenAI is reshaping the entire purchase journey. Consumers will increasingly delegate the middle of their shopping journey to AI agents, while brands must focus on inspiring at the beginning and converting at the end. The path from awareness to purchase is collapsing rapidly.

Becoming “AI recommendable” is the new SEO. Brands must shift from direct advertising to teaching machines about their products through structured data, reviews, and user-generated content. Over 60% of consumers now trust AI recommendations about brands and products.

Discovery-led commerce is replacing brand-led marketing. Unless consumers are already loyal customers, they’ll approach AI in discovery mode, asking for recommendations rather than searching for specific brands. Brands must optimize for how they show up in these conversations.

Data infrastructure is everything. Your AI is only as good as the data you feed it. Marketing leaders must prioritize real-time, diverse data foundations over flashy AI applications. Data needs to be cloud-ready and interoperable.

Measurement frameworks must evolve beyond clicks. Success metrics in an AI-mediated world include conversation quality, response time, and insight generation. The businesses that measure and learn fastest will win.

Human oversight remains critical. AI can make decisions faster and potentially better, but it requires constant human critical thinking and oversight. The technology is “worryingly sycophantic” and will tell you what you want to hear rather than uncomfortable truths.

Conclusion: Embrace agentic AI as your strategic partner

GenAI’s evolution from conversational tool to commerce agent represents a fundamental shift in how marketing teams operate. This ShopAble in the Park session, featuring industry leaders from Publicis, AWS, Microsoft, and Croud, demonstrated that we’re already living in the age of AI-powered marketing, where agents handle routine tasks so that humans can focus on strategy and innovation.

The time for tentative AI experimentation is over. Marketing leaders must move beyond pilot programs and begin integrating agentic AI into their core operations. Start with your data infrastructure, establish clear prompting protocols, and gradually increase automation levels as trust builds. The organizations that transform their teams into AI-enhanced strategic units today will dominate tomorrow’s competitive landscape.

Thank you for joining us at ShopAble in the Park 2025. We hope these insights inspire meaningful change in your organization, and we look forward to continuing these crucial conversations at our next gathering.

Learn more from the ShopAble in the Park 2025 expert sessions:

• How Agentic AI Is Reshaping Daily Life for Marketing Teams
• Does Retail Media Belong with Commerce or Media Teams
• Is Retail Media Unstoppable, or a Bubble About to Burst?