Virtualstock Vision Summit 2026 Recap

There was no mistake that we spent the day looking through the Vision Summit 2026 logo to the view out over the city of London from the WPP offices, the financial district in the background was a constant reminder throughout the day, which largely focused on the shift to Agentic AI, that it’s all about running a profitable business.

Businesses are already exploring how AI can improve decision-making, streamline operations and reshape how customers discover and engage with brands, but what about the practical questions of how discovery and execution will be impacted and how do you ensure it will be positive for your customers and employees?

AI is the catalyst for a shift in both technological and operational excellence and that’s what the Vision Summit 2026 was all about! The reality is that brands now have two audiences to consider – people and machines – and they want different things although the end goal is the same, we all want more sales!

But interestingly, Linda Cereda, Former Global and EMEA VP of Marketing Data, Nike argues that brand building, human loyalty, owned customer relationships and physical experiences may become more valuable, not less, in an AI-native world. So where do you place your bets, what’s worth pursuing in an AI world? That’s what the day aimed to answer.

My afternoon at Vision Summit 2026 began with a session hosted by Simon Spencelayh, Managing Director at Robert Dyas and this is where things became a bit more practitioner led, getting into the detail of the relationship between retailer and supplier.

How do you create a scalable dropship operation as a retailer and what challenges does this present to suppliers trading on your platform. Lively roundtable discussions talked about both how suppliers approach dropship and what retailers are looking for to make the partnership a success.

Then it was a back for a discussion on how owns AI… is this a function reserved for your CTO and the IT department, or are your workers romping away using AI without any governance guide rails in place? How do you create enough structure to scale AI without slowing innovation down? is a question many organisations are still grappling with.

The day finished with a provocative session hosted by Shaje Ganny, Author, President & Founder, Swiss AI Academy. Group Director, Digital Transformation, P&G Europe, who argued that removing human capability is a mistake in an AI world.

His perspective is from your people – will AI make them happier and more productive as if not then something is going wrong!

Massively interesting, he strayed slightly into politics on AI guard rails pretty much saying from a regulatory perspective that the genie is already out of the bottle, but people and their happiness was at the core of his talk, and a certainty that humans remain central to ensuring that AI works both in general and for your business.

It was also great to see Omar Qari, the CEO of Logicbroker who Virtualstock is now a part of, and his recap of the Vision Summit 2026 sessions at the end of the day brought everything together before the networking drinks began!