NRF Retail's Big Show Asia Pacific 2026 wrapped last week at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Around 11,000 delegates from across Southeast Asia, North Asia, and Australia gathered under the show's theme, The Next Now, to talk about where retail is heading and what teams need to do about it today.

We were on the floor for all three days. Here’s what stood out from our eyes on the ground. 

AI: The new buyer on the scene.

Agentic commerce permeated keynotes, breakouts, and booth conversations alike. The traditional purchasing model is shifting fast as AI agents make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers. Agents can scan listings, compare stock availability, and complete transactions with little to no manual input, presenting choices on a silver platter to the human on the other end. 

What that means for commerce platforms is less obvious than what it means for individual consumers. An AI agent can’t do its job without accurate, real-time data. If your inventory counts are stale, your pricing is a batch away from truth, or your product availability is only updated overnight, the agent makes the wrong call. The retailer takes the hit.

This came up repeatedly in sessions like "Agentic Commerce Is Already Here" and "From SEO to ACO: The New Playbook for Brands to get into AI's Consideration Set." The common thread was the same: agents need authoritative signals, not snapshots. That is a real-time infrastructure problem before it is an AI problem.

APAC leads the charge in eCommerce experience, omnichannel’s catching up. 

Asia Pacific is home to some of the most advanced e-commerce experiences anywhere. Mobile-first buying, QR payments, super-app ecosystems, and next-day (or same-day) delivery are already table stakes in markets like Singapore, South Korea, and Indonesia.

Omnichannel is still catching up. There is a real gap between the polish of the online journey and what customers experience when they interact with the same brand in a physical store, through a call center, or in a marketplace. Behind the scenes, offline and online data are often siloed, making unified visibility hard to act on.

Closing that gap starts with the same event substrate: a single real-time layer that propagates stock changes, order status, campaign activations, and pricing updates across every surface the moment something changes. When one channel knows something, all channels should know it instantly. 

Velocity and conversion under pressure. 

In conversations on the floor, a few themes came up again and again regardless of whether we were talking to a DTC brand, a marketplace operator, or a multi-channel retailer:

Cart abandonment. Cart abandonment is still one of the highest-pressure metrics in e-commerce. Most teams know the email-based recovery playbook. Fewer have solved for real-time, in-session intervention: prompting a buyer while they are still on the site, escalating to a targeted promotion when a high-value cart goes idle, or recovering a session that is drifting before it closes. Push notifications that meet shoppers wherever they are, whether the app is open or not, are a more complete answer than email alone.

Inventory accuracy under pressure. Flash sales, limited drops, and live selling events expose every weakness in a batch-sync inventory setup. A unit selling on one channel while another still shows "in stock" means cancellations, bad reviews, and in some markets, marketplace penalties. Real-time inventory management that propagates stock changes the moment they happen, and locks reservations at the cart level, is the difference between a clean event and a firefight.

On-platform trust in marketplaces. P2P and C2C marketplace teams talked about the same structural challenge: buyers and sellers are moving their negotiations to WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, or SMS because in-app communication feels slow or limited. Once a conversation leaves your platform, you lose the transaction fee, the moderation ability, and the dispute audit trail. Keeping buyer-seller conversations inside your marketplace is both a conversion and a compliance problem.

What’s next now… 

The Next Now framing that ran through the show was a useful pressure test. It’s not enough to have a plan for what comes next. Teams need the infrastructure to act on that plan at speed, across channels, reliably.

If any of the topics above connect to something you’re building or evaluating, talk to our team. To go deeper on the technical side, our eCommerce solutions page covers the patterns we discussed here in more detail.