American retail giant Walmart’s keynote revealed a host of technological innovations across its physical estate and digital presence, ranging from an AI-powered in-home replenishment service and ultra-scalable smart exit tech to its new Shop with Friends app feature marrying AR with AI.

Easing grocery shoppers’ mental load by helping novice cooks broaden their horizons and meal planning, as well as letting foodies break out of their recipe routine rut (while continuing to consume their favourite ingredients), American food delivery platform Instacart debuted the new AI-powered capabilities of its smart Caper Carts.

Focusing on how to make social media users feel seen – specifically by giving them a sense of self-discovery – Pinterest revealed its new AI-driven sharing of users’ keywords (the words Pinterest uses to describe the images they click on) with them.

Iterating its previous diagnostic tools, such as 2020’s Skin Genius, French beauty giant L’Oréal described how its new AI assistant provides a template for beauty and wellness brands to digitally occupy a problem-solving role akin to a beauty adviser (see The Evolution of AR Try-On in Beauty Retail’s Digi Revolution).

Neha Singh, chief executive of US-based experiential e-commerce platform Obsess, detailed the next chapter of metaverse-lite brandiverses – discovery-based non-communal branded virtual environments – which can deliver 61% longer session times and 26% higher average order values than regular e-commerce sites (Obsess, 2024).

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) discussed how its new generative-AI-created virtual world, made by its custom content studio The Trust, evolves journalistic storytelling while demonstrating to clients how to execute sustainability-centric communications. Intriguingly, given mistrust around AI’s reliability, the tech was used to fact-check the stories told within the world.