2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Best Use of Automation in Retail finalists announced including EE and Snag
We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Best Use of Automation in the Retail Sector 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 Best Use of Automation in the Retail Sector finalists as follows:
commercetools and Trail Appliances
Trail Appliances’ growth had created a problem: the commerce platform that once supported the business was now holding it back.
Complex promotions were difficult to deliver, development was increasingly time-consuming and the business needed greater freedom to innovate. Rather than accept those constraints, Trail Appliances rebuilt its commerce foundation with commercetools. Its flexible, API first approach allowed Trail’s development team to integrate best-of-breed technologies including Algolia and Voucherify and build around its specific needs.
The results: site load time fell 57%, conversion more than doubled, average SEO ranking improved approximately 200%, and revenue delivered strong double digit growth.
EE Retail
STAT! (Store Tools and Tasks, also inspired by the Latin statim, meaning ‘immediately’) is transforming how EE Retail manages operational activity.
Previously, tasks were spread across legacy automations, standalone apps and reporting tools. STAT! brings everything into one operational platform, with RALPH, the Retail Action Log (Pretty Helpful!), providing a single view of required actions. Tasks are scheduled or automatically triggered by operational data, helping stores act quickly while giving leaders live visibility of progress and risk.
The result is a simpler, smarter operation, improving on-time task completion and freeing store teams to focus on what matters most: customers.
Flip and Liquid I.V.
Liquid I.V. transformed its phone service from seasonal shutdowns into a channel available around the clock with Flip’s conversational AI. Facing summer call volumes four to five times normal levels, the brand deployed an AI agent in approximately 2.5 weeks to resolve customer requests while preserving its distinctive voice.
Today, 45% of calls are automated end to end, call abandonment has fallen 65%, and average handle time has dropped 81%. Phone lines remain open through peak summer demand; agents focus on complex customer needs; and conversation insights help teams identify product feedback, inventory concerns, and customer sentiment to inform decisions.
Furniture Connect
Furniture Connect is automating the end-to-end path from a finished furniture product to an ecommerce listing across multiple channels. Instead of requiring teams to coordinate photography, image editing, product preparation, catalogue content and channel formatting as separate tasks, the platform brings them into a single agent driven workflow.
Products can be processed in batches across whole ranges, imagery and variations generated from existing assets and ecommerce content prepared without the traditional production cycle. The result is less repetitive work, fewer handoffs and a much faster route to sale. Barker and Stonehouse can now bring more than 100 products online in a single week, where the process previously took months, while GJ Styles has cut the time involved in creating, preparing and uploading imagery by around 90%.
Goddiva
Goddiva has built an AI powered automation ecosystem connecting customer experience, retail intelligence and fashion product development. Simple customer inputs can trigger personalised product recommendations, sizing guidance, virtual try-on, order tracking and return support.
Behind this, Goddiva’s Global Product Analysis interprets sales, returns, stock, size and style performance to generate actionable trading intelligence. These insights connect with an AI powered Design Studio spanning trend forecasting, design exploration, costing, competitor analysis, size ratio planning, technical specifications and grading.
The result is a connected automation cycle where customer behaviour and retail performance increasingly inform what Goddiva designs, buys, produces and presents next.
Lily AI
Before a product reaches a consumer, an AI system increasingly decides whether it gets discovered or recommended. Lily AI has spent six years making products understandable to these systems.
Launched in August 2026, Lily Max turns that intelligence into action: agents identify missing product information, enrich it in consumer language, test changes against controls and deploy what works across paid media and AI discovery. Used by leading retailers and brands including Marks & Spencer, Vuori, Hibbett Sports, Shiseido and Coach, Lily has run 1,000+ controlled tests. Lily Max makes products understandable to AI, and proves the commercial impact when they are.
Optimum Retailing
Most AI merchandising tools produce plans, not planograms. Head office teams still turn each plan into a layout for every fixture in every store, by hand. Optimum Retailing automates that step.
Realgram AI reads sales, inventory and store conditions and generates a store specific planogram for every fixture, giving the best positions to high margin, fast selling products. Image recognition then verifies each set-up as the photo is taken. Print, distribution and store issues are managed in the same platform. Retailers using Realgram AI have seen 5 to 15% higher in-store revenue and 15 to 25% fewer labour hours.
Public Group
Public Group, which operates public.gr, public.cy and publicbusiness.gr, replaced more than ten disconnected tools and spreadsheets with Content Dashboard, an in-house platform that runs product content as a production line.
The platform decides for itself how much content each product justifies, from its category, its price and the data available - then builds to that level, sourcing specifications and images from manufacturer sites from 871 manufacturer brands, filling and validating attributes, and writing descriptions. It runs unattended overnight and through weekends; editors review finished work each morning, and content produced once serves all three storefronts.
Weekly backlogs of products waiting for content have fallen by around 80%, specification fill rates have moved from 40% to complete, and output per editor has risen more than fourfold.
Retail Express
Retail Express has transformed grocery pricing by replacing manual, error-prone spreadsheets with an AI powered Intelligent Merchandising engine. Focused on Pricing Automation and Automatic Application of Retailer Strategy, the solution elevates trading teams from administrative roles to strategic leaders.
By automating routine pricing actions across the long tail, ensuring strict guardrails, margin protection, and compliance - the platform powers real-time responses to cost changes and competitor moves. Deployed with a major European grocer, the solution achieved an 85% automation rate, boosted gross margin by 2%, and cut competitor response times from two weeks to two minutes.
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.
