AI and agents are redefining every corner and specialism of commerce before our eyes. They are changing how consumers buy, how they discover brands, and how businesses sell. In this world, growth becomes harder to predict, and scaling performance becomes harder to achieve.

To compete, brands, retailers, media owners, and commerce platforms must move beyond isolated optimization towards collaborative, predictive advantage. Together with WPP, we brought industry leaders from across Tesco Media, Trainline, The Telegraph, and WPP Media to InfoSummit London to explore what must change and how new models of collaboration are empowering businesses to win in this new era.

The only thing that permeates this entire world is intelligence

Kicking the event off was Samantha Bukowski, WPP's Global President, Commerce, who explained that at the heart of commerce lie two core principles: a practice and a promise. A practice that connects every dimension of commerce, from stores and ecommerce to social, retail media, creators, culture, AI, and agentic systems.. And the promise: driving growth and outcomes for clients.

Sam explained that while the promise holds, the practice constantly evolves. AI is uprooting the entire system, changing commerce forever: "Increasingly you have LLMs sitting across the top of this world reading the entirety of a brand's digital and physical footprint and completely changing the way that brands think about discovery and shopping."

The implications are profound. Brands can no longer afford to work in isolation and optimize for specific channels. They must think about the entirety of their footprint across paid, earned, owned, and shared channels, as well as build for both humans and algorithms.

So how do brands approach this new era? Sam put it simply: "The only thing that permeates this entire world is intelligence. To master this, you have to be a master of intelligence."

There is now an intelligence imperative for every brand. The goal is to build intelligence as dimensional as the consumers we're serving. "People are dimensional beings, we don't just need to know who they are demographically, we need to know the communities they belong to, what resonates with them, what content they're consuming, how they're moving, the patterns they're demonstrating, and what makes them tick, so ultimately we can become more predictive in the way we approach marketing."

Key to building this intelligence is unlocking commerce data. Deep, rich signals that are durable, diverse, and deterministic. The challenge is that it doesn't sit in one place. It's scattered across the ecosystem, which is why data collaboration has become essential.

Intelligence is the goal, data collaboration is the playbook

If intelligence is the goal, then data collaboration is the playbook. Brands, retailers, media owners, platforms, and data owners all hold unique insight into consumer behavior, mindsets, and intentions. In isolation, they’re useful, but together they create intelligence that helps companies understand why consumers act and what they’ll do next. I had the pleasure of hosting our panel discussion with Tesco Media, Trainline, The Telegraph, and WPP Media, which looked at how businesses are unlocking new models of collaboration to drive growth in an AI-driven world.

Camilla Child, Director of Data Strategy at The Telegraph, perfectly captured the opportunity and value of data collaboration: "I think there is a huge opportunity for media owners, partners, businesses who occupy entirely different parts of the customer journey of that person's interactions with the internet. [...] How you are able to engage with them when they're in those different mindsets, different moments, using different data points, I think that's a really exciting opportunity."

But as David Fieldhouse, Global Executive Director, Commerce Data & Innovation at WPP Media, explained, the value of data collaboration can only be realized when it's built on trust, privacy, and non-movement of data: "You talk about promising performance, and [data collaboration] actually makes this real. [...] When you're in a world where data doesn't move, data lives exactly where it should be, which is inside our client's architecture and so on, that means we can collaborate, and we can actually hit that promise."

This point was built upon by Sam Eads, Head of Ad Sales and Operations at Trainline, who explained as a data owner this protection enables Trainline to give brands full, secure access to their data, which in turn drives better performance: "From a collaboration standpoint, just how are we effectively using our data and the sheer scale of our audience [...] to allow partner brands to be able to access and understand our data sets in much greater depth, and then ultimately that performance that you see at the end of it is much greater as a result."

Stephen Edwards, Head of Agency at Tesco Media, emphasized how collaboration is enabling the company to unlock new opportunities: "The partnerships that we've recently announced with the likes of WPP and Adobe are helping us to drive a better understanding of customer behavior outside of our world. [...] I think that has really interesting use cases for marketing and for personalization. It has really interesting use cases for our retail media business because it allows us to credibly reach into other non-CPG kinds of segments."

The opportunity brands never had before

To close the event, Kate Rowlinson, CEO, UK at WPP Media, spoke to Stephan Pretorius, CTO at WPP, and Lauren Wetzel, Global President, Data and Technology Solutions at WPP, who explored what the future holds and why the consumer should always remain the north star. 

Building intelligence capable of influencing consumers requires moving beyond narrow views of identity to reflect the way humans actually experience and navigate the world. Lauren made this point powerfully: "Identity is an interesting ingredient. But guess what's interesting? Community, culture, intent, nuance. And the only way you can connect that is when you have that level of machine learning powerhouse and capability that allows you to do that."

Stephan backed this up by explaining how collaboration is opening up new opportunities with AI: " So this idea of vector embeddings, this idea of what is the commonality between a music track, an image, a client brief, and a piece of poetry, AI can do that. [...] When we talk about agentic marketing, it's obviously marketing operations, agentic orchestration, but it's also putting agents on top of data collaborations to be able to see patterns and opportunities in datasets that were never connectable before."

The combination of AI and data collaborations means brands can now connect any type of data to create tailored, exclusive intelligence that truly understands what makes us human. This ability will not only enhance marketing effectiveness, but it will also drive positive change for the very thing we’re seeking to do as an industry, delivering better customer experiences, as Lauren explained.

“It should be about the authenticity of a brand. I think so much of what I would call the route towards personalization, frankly, just created too much generalization of categories and segments in a way that actually wasn't necessarily grounded in what's unique to a brand. This is the opportunity that brands frankly never had before to unlock that in a really unique way.”

The path forward

The message from InfoSummit London was clear: the next era of commerce will not be defined by who holds the most data, but by who connects intelligence across the ecosystem. As AI and agentic systems accelerate change, the intelligence imperative has never been more urgent.

Interested in attending a future InfoSummit? Register your interest here.