We had a fantastic time at NRF APAC in Singapore. Connecting with retailers and partners truly inspired us and confirmed us in the direction we are moving in with Lobyco Nexus. Having our great partners from Foodstuffs at our stand helped us even more to listen in on retailers talking with each other about the challenges that they’re facing. So, if you're building, running, or scaling a retail business in this region, it's worth paying close attention to where the industry is heading.
Here are some of the themes that we discovered at NRF.
We've spent the last couple of years getting comfortable with generative AI, but the conversation has already moved on. The next evolution is agentic AI, where AI doesn't just respond to prompts, it actively reasons, plans, and takes action on a user's behalf. In a commerce context, that means AI that can browse, compare, and complete purchases without the shopper lifting a finger.
On the operations side, the same logic applies: autonomous inventory management, smarter procurement, and supply chains that self-optimise in real time. The infrastructure to act on customer signals in the moment is exactly what makes agentic retail viable, and it starts with having the right foundations in place.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Retail media has gone from an experimental ad format to a $30 billion USD annual industry in just nine years. For context, e-commerce took over two decades to reach that kind of scale.
The growth opportunity in APAC is particularly compelling, with markets like Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia still in early stages of adoption. For retailers with first-party data and owned digital platforms, this is a serious monetisation lever, and one that only gets more valuable as analytics and forecasting tools improve.
The idea of a single-purpose app is increasingly a thing of the past. Consumers across APAC are spending more time inside platforms that bundle shopping, payments, loyalty, and gamification into one experience. The logic is straightforward: more time on platform equals more opportunities to engage and convert.
For brands building loyalty programmes or digital experiences, this convergence of features is shaping what customers now expect as standard.
There's an interesting tension in APAC retail right now. Digital experiences in this region are genuinely world-class, often outpacing what you'd find in the US or Europe. But the offline experience frequently lags, and the data connecting the two is often siloed.
That gap matters. A loyalty programme that only works online, or a customer profile that resets when someone walks into a store, is a missed opportunity. The retailers that figure out how to connect those dots, bringing online and offline data into a single coherent view, are the ones best positioned to build lasting customer relationships.
Gen Z is moving into serious purchasing power, and they're bringing a fundamentally different relationship with brands and discovery. Loyalty to an algorithm over a brand name, a preference for conversation over advertising, and search behaviour driven by intent rather than specific brand terms. These aren't niche quirks. They're the new baseline.
For retailers, this means rethinking what loyalty actually means to this cohort. It's not just points and discounts. It's relevance, experience, and the feeling that a brand genuinely knows them.
The through-line across all of these themes is one we think about a lot at Lobyco. Retail in APAC is evolving fast, and the platforms that can connect all the layers, promotions, loyalty mechanics, communications, and real-time orchestration, rather than just one or two, are the ones that will keep retailers ahead of it. We built Lobyco Nexus specifically for this: a
single, cohesive platform that makes loyalty easier to manage and more meaningful to customers. The retailers we work with across APAC, EMEA, and North America are already seeing what that kind of cohesion delivers.
