Shoptalk 2026: What Actually Mattered

Just got back from Shoptalk 2026 in Vegas. Three days, hundreds of booths, a lot of noise. Some real signals underneath it.

Here’s what stuck with me and a few bonus takes from our team.

1. “Agentic AI” was on every second booth. The substance usually wasn’t.

AI agents that plan your media, build your creative, optimize everything while you sleep. Most of it was a slide deck rebrand.

What nobody had on a banner: what makes AI defensible isn’t the model or the interface. It’s the data underneath. At Billo, our AI features – persona prediction, script generation, video remixing – work because they sit on years of real creator production data. Thousands of campaigns, real performance outcomes. Strip the data away and you have a prompt. Keep the data and you have a product.

2. Reddit keynoted. One stat: 40% of their conversations are commercial.

People go to Reddit to research purchases and hear from real humans before they buy. That’s a signal about where consumer trust is heading – away from polished brand channels, toward spaces where people talk like people.

We’ve been saying human-made creator content is becoming premium. Reddit’s growth is evidence of the same shift. Consumers are getting sharper at spotting what’s real vs manufactured.

3. The “volume of assets” problem went mainstream.

Every brand at Shoptalk 2026 was saying the same thing – we need more creative. More formats, more variations, more hooks, more platform-native cuts. Traditional production timelines don’t work anymore.

This is exactly what we built Billo to solve. Not by replacing creators with AI faces – we made that call early. The same cheap AI avatars available to premium brands are available to every scammer on the internet. That’s not a differentiator, it’s a race to the bottom.

Our approach: real creators, real faces, real voices. Then AI to scale it – remix videos, generate variations, match creators to products using performance data. Volume without losing what makes the content work.

4. The booth was the best part.

Dozens of brands came up unprompted. They already knew Billo. No pitch needed – just conversations about what they’re working on and how we could help.

4,500+ brands used Billo in the last 12 months. We broke records in Q1 – our down season. Built from Lithuania, serving brands mostly in and for the US, in one of the most competitive spaces in adtech.

When brands walk up to your booth and already know your name, it tells you the work is landing.

Where this heads.

AI is reshaping creative production – but not the way most booths were selling it. The brands that win won’t automate humans out of their content. They’ll keep real people in the loop and use AI to make that content go further, faster.

That’s the bet we made. It’s compounding.