2026 RTIH Innovation Awards UK Technology Vendor finalists include Focal Systems, Datitude, GoPlaces
We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards UK Technology Vendor of the Year 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 Technology Vendor of the Year (UK) finalists as follows:
Attensi
Attensi helps retailers train frontline colleagues through practice, not paperwork. Its platform combines behavioural psychology, game design and AI.
Colleagues rehearse real customer conversations with lifelike AI characters in RealTalk, play gamified store simulations and get instant feedback until they feel confident. Embla, Attensi's AI co-designer, lets retail L&D teams build and update training in minutes, while Insights shows exactly which skills are improving.
In the past year, B&Q used RealTalk to strengthen selling and coaching for around 2,500 showroom colleagues and managers, and IHOP replaced paper-based training across more than 1,700 restaurants. Circle K has engaged 14,000 store staff across eight countries.
Datitude
Every new retail system solves a problem. Each also adds another version of the truth. Datitude fixes that. Its unified data platform brings data from retailers' systems into one trusted foundation, so every team, BI tool and AI model works from the same numbers.
In 2026 it added a Semantic Layer, giving everyone shared business definitions, and an AI Gateway, letting retailers use their choice of AI on governed data. A fully managed platform and service, run by a team who get retail, tech and data. Most clients work with Datitude for years. Many new ones come through recommendation.
Focal Systems
Focal Systems uses fixed cameras and computer vision to keep supermarket shelves full. Its cameras photograph every shelf every hour, spot gaps, and help staff fix them. At Morrisons, Focal covers around 500 supermarkets.
The time to spot an empty shelf fell from 12 to 24 hours to about 30 minutes, on-shelf availability rose 2 to 4%, and Morrisons saves more than £10 million a year in labour. In the past year, Focal and Morrisons went further: trialling cameras in the back room, designing shelf labels that light up to guide restocking, and rebuilding the metrics so every store's numbers are checked against a measured standard.
GoPlaces
Go Places is a creative company with a heart of analytics: part agency, part software developer, built for enterprise brands on TikTok Shop. It built OnePlace, the first unified analytics and decision-intelligence platform for the channel, because the data problem underneath it was nobody else's priority.
In two years, it has gone from two founders to a team of 50+, 22 major brands including TRIP, PerfectTed, The Body Shop, Haleon and Sensodyne, £3 milion ARR and the UK's largest live shopping operation by studio count. Brands on OnePlace average a 25% ROI improvement.
Quail Digital
Quail Digital's Pro12 retail headset system is redefining how modern retailers communicate and operate. More than a wireless headset, Pro12 combines crystal clear team communication with built-in speech recognition, AI integration, intelligent safety alerts and an open platform that connects colleagues, technology and store operations.
Designed for today's connected retail environment, it empowers store teams to work more efficiently, make faster decisions and remain focused on serving customers. By improving store efficiency and employee wellbeing, the Pro12 retail headset system helps retailers deliver a safer, more productive workplace and an exceptional customer experience, while laying the foundation for Quail Digital's vision of the intelligent connected store.
Quin AI
Quin AI gives retailers a real-time customer intelligence layer. Its three AI agents build a live customer context for every shopper, optimise offers and recommend complementary products, and feed that context into enterprise systems, including LLMs.
At Koçtaş A.Ş., Kingfisher's home improvement retailer in Türkiye, Quin lifted conversion 1.63x and has sustained 10–15% incremental revenue since 2024, with campaign cost below 3%. The same context guides Koçtaş's LLM-powered chatbot, routing conversations to live agents with 90% accuracy; around 40% of routed calls convert to a sale.
Webtrends Optimize
Halfords had begun embarking on a personalisation journey prior to working with Webtrends Optimize but the latter's role as conversion rate optimisation expert was to scale personalisation across the retailer's website and improve users' experiences by streamlining processes and enhancing its personalisation programme to provide the best experience for visitors.
Xiatech
Retailers want AI but lack the foundation. Systems are not connected, data is not unified and processes are manual. Xfuze, an agentic orchestration platform, is that agentic ready foundation. It unifies integration and orchestration, data management, insights and analytics, and agentic AI in one platform. The CHIP family of AI agents, led by CHIP Assist, an AI assistant, gives teams answers.
Line of business Xfuze Agents, governed in the Xfuze AI Control Tower, replenish stock, answer shoppers and much more. Moss, Reiss, WHSmith and Flying Tiger Copenhagen use Xfuze.
