2026 RTIH Innovation Awards AI Technology (UK) finalists include John Lewis, FoundIt!, Iceland and Snag
We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards AI Technology (UK) category. We received a record number of entries this year and many fantastic examples of technology excellence driving transformative change across the global retail sector.
Check out a rundown of our 2026 shortlists and finalists here.
Congratulations to all those who made it through the initial submission process! It’s now over to our star studded judging panel who will decide the winners to be announced at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London.
The event will be held on Wednesday, 4th November and consist of a drinks reception, three course meal, awards ceremony presided over by award winning stand-up comedian, presenter, actor and broadcaster, Aurie Styla, and after party until 1am.
Click here to book your place at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, 4th November.
Our 2026 AI Technology (UK) finalists as follows:
Bodycare and PMC
Bodycare was bought out of administration in 2025 and established an ambitious, innovation driven store opening programme to bring its affordable health and beauty offering back to the high street, with AI central to its comeback.
Its ambition is to become an AI first retailer, running store operations through its own proprietary, custom built AI platform, with AI decisioning powering colleague actions and data captured in-store continuously feeding back to sharpen the platform and performance.
Furniture Connect
Furniture Connect is using AI to make more of a furniture retailer’s existing range commercially viable online. The innovation is not simply generating better product images. The real opportunity is using AI to produce the volume and quality of content retailers need, quickly and consistently, across different ecommerce channels.
Goddiva
Goddiva AI is a proprietary AI powered fashion commerce ecosystem developed to transform how customers discover, select and purchase occasionwear online.
Built using OpenAI GPT, LangChain, Pinecone Vector Database, Python, Django, MySQL and Shopify integration, it combines conversational commerce, semantic product discovery, intelligent personalisation, AI Size Finder, Virtual Try-On and automated customer support within one connected platform.
Beyond the customer journey, Goddiva AI powers bestseller analysis, trend forecasting and product performance prediction. The technology has moved beyond experimentation to deliver measurable commercial impact, generating approximately £2.5 million in AI assisted revenue, increasing conversion from 1.4% to 2.5% and reducing returns by 10%.
Iceland and SAI
Iceland partnered with SAI to harness AI to make its stores smarter, safer and easier to run, tackling shrink while improving colleague productivity and operational performance.
SAI’s AI powered platform transforms existing store data into actionable intelligence, enabling Iceland to identify and respond to loss more effectively while giving colleagues the insight they need to take practical action on the shopfloor.
Rather than remaining a proof of concept, the technology is now playing a significant role in Iceland’s highest shrink stores, helping the retailer target the locations responsible for a disproportionate share of total losses and making stores harder environments for theft.
John Lewis and FoundIt!
John Lewis and FoundIt! deployed genuine, scalable AI to transform retail discovery across a complex 170,000-SKU catalogue. The initiative tackled both sides of the journey: helping customers navigate products through intelligent Visual Navigation, while making relevant ranges more discoverable through automated, intent led SEO.
Together, these complementary capabilities created a powerful discovery flywheel, bringing more relevant shoppers to the site, helping them find products more easily and generating an eight-figure commercial benefit.
Levy and Kappture
Levy and Kappture have together, delivered Europe’s largest frictionless store deployment into Manchester United, with seven BRISK bars operating across the historic Old Trafford.
BRISK is Kappture’s proprietary computer vision technology, transforming the traditional bar experience by allowing fans to enter, select and take their products and leave without stopping at a till. AI powered product recognition automatically identifies purchases, while payment and receipts are processed instantly, significantly reducing queues and increasing customer throughput, as well as delivering an excellent fan experience.
The technology is designed from the ground up to operate at the pace and scale required during live sporting events and its performance demonstrates the impact, with one BRISK store reaching a record 21 transactions in a single minute and processing up to 43 products in the same period compared with a maximum of approximately 10 transactions per minute at a traditional bar.
Minimist
Donated second-hand stock is the hardest inventory in retail for AI to handle. Every item is a one-off with no barcode, no SKU and no product data, arriving in unpredictable condition, so none of the catalogue assumptions that make retail AI work apply.
Minimist turns a single photograph of a donated item into a priced, measured, described listing published across eight marketplaces in 30 seconds, against up to 10 minutes by hand. 89% of listings publish with no human edit at all. 73,844 items have been listed this way by 28 charity retailers across the UK, Ireland and Australia, and 31,580 of them have sold.
Snag and Patchworks
Snag, a size inclusive DTC fashion brand shipping to 100+ countries, has taken AI beyond chat and into live retail operations.
Using Claude as the reasoning layer and Patchworks as the execution layer via MCP, Snag's team now runs product and order operations across multiple Shopify storefronts, five warehouse systems, its PLM, Sage 200 and marketplaces through plain language instructions. Patchworks closed the gaps native AI connectors couldn't: it reached systems with no MCP server and unlocked Shopify's Bulk Operations API.
The result: 14,000+ products updated in a single operation, and one of Snag's fastest ever product launches, delivered in around two weeks.
