The experimentation phase is over. At Accelerate 2026, the signal from industry leaders was loud and clear: the future of AI is no longer a theoretical exercise — it’s an operational necessity, and leading companies are already making it a core part of their baseline functions. In the retail sector alone, 58% of companies are actively deploying AI. Consumers are increasingly shopping through agents that have never visited a brand’s website. And in manufacturing, some companies are deploying AI-powered agents as live, queryable knowledgebases to address the loss of institutional knowledge as millions of skilled trade jobs are projected to be unfilled by 2030.
For both retail and manufacturing leaders, the choice is clear: AI is a critical operational priority. The organizations that showed up at Accelerate 2026 weren’t just talking about pilot projects, they were demonstrating production-grade, agentic workflows that are changing their business models in real time.
The big shift: from search to agents
The Snowflake 2026 Data Trends reports are unambiguous: we have entered the Era of Agentic AI. For retail, the traditional model of digital commerce is being disrupted as consumers increasingly embrace conversation over search. As Shanthi Rajagopalan, Global Head of Strategy for Retail & Consumer Goods at Microsoft, noted during our executive panel with Microsoft at NRF 2026, “In the traditional retail world, we always thought about stores and real estate as location, location, location. And as we moved into digital and ecommerce, it became all about search, search, search.” However, as Rajagopalan added, “What we’re really seeing now is a disruption again, with consumers turning more and more to conversational interfaces for product discovery and purchases.”
