2026 commerce media predictions from the Incremental team
With developments like Instacart partnering with ChatGPT late last year, 2026 is poised to be another year with AI at the center of conversations. We asked the team what they're watching this year in the commerce media industry.
More holistic measurement of retail media
"More brands will stop treating retail media as a siloed performance channel and start managing it as a true full-funnel commerce growth investment, spanning onsite search, offsite display, social, CTV, and even in-store. As measurement standards continue to mature, it's becoming easier to plan, evaluate, and fund retail media holistically rather than network by network." —Max Prosser, senior director of sales
Human shopping behavior will still reign over agentic AI
"Agentic AI will generate more noise than real change in ecommerce traffic. User adoption will continue to grow in 2026. However, we are still several years away from AI agents managing the full purchase cycle, and even further from agent-to-agent commerce with little to no human decision-making. Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces still control discovery, purchase, and ad inventory, and have little incentive to displace traffic outside their ecosystems. As a result, the foundations of retail media will remain largely unchanged. Real human shopping behavior, platform-controlled marketplaces, and walled gardens will continue to define how demand is created and captured." —Troy Aral, sales director
No more separate scoreboards
"In 2026, retail media will move past 'ROAS theater' and standardize around incrementality—holdouts, lift tests, and causal measurement—as marketers and CFOs demand proof of net-new sales, not just attributed sales, across growing RMN budgets. Just as importantly, brands will start measuring the combined impact of retail media and upper-funnel channels that feed it (search, social, CTV), not treating them as separate scoreboards. Retailers, brands, and agencies that can't run clean experiments at scale will be at a real disadvantage. In short, incrementality will be the measurement layer that makes omnichannel retail media real at scale." —Alan Osetek, strategic advisor
Offsite will mature
"While retail media has moved full funnel with now even some brand dollars flowing into video and CTV, 2026 will be the year of maturation. Running sustained upper funnel brand building efforts requires a different skillset, stronger investments in creative, and closer coordination with existing national brand building media. This continued move up the funnel will reignite existing debates over who 'owns retail media.' " —Skye Frontier, EVP
