On 2 upcoming dates, I’ll be providing an online talk that explores an emerging shift: employees becoming Human Agents, AI agents built from real people that hold their expertise and can act on it.

Companies have always struggled to retain and leverage the knowledge inside their own people. Every wiki and knowledge base ever built died the same way, because it needed someone to remember to feed or find it. Expertise stays trapped in heads, in Slack, and in decks on a server nobody remembers to check. And the loss is expensive: unplanned downtime costs manufacturers an estimated $1 trillion a year, and the industry now says that’s turning into a knowledge problem as veterans retire.

What’s changed is a collision of AI interviews, agentic access and knowledge graphs, which together make it possible to capture how a person actually reasons, and then let the rest of the organization interogate this.

But the interesting part isn’t retention, it’s what happens next. A Human Agent doesn’t sit in an archive waiting to be searched. A Human Agent works for its employer and the employee. Ask it a question and it reasons like the person it came from, but it can reach further than they ever could, across the company’s own research, live market data and outside expertise none of them own. Your best strategist, with a body of knowledge they never had time to read.

And then it stops answering and starts doing. It builds the marketing plan. It develops the retail strategy. It consults the Human Agent two desks over when the question crosses into their lane. Give it a year and it will be spotting the opportunity nobody in the building had time to look for.

I’ll walk through how Human Agents actually get built, the problems that come with them. We’ll talk “onclauding”, LLM probing, and expert interviews run by AI assistants - and of course how this is is changing the way I think about Fodda.

And we’ll finish on the hard questions: employer ethics, employee compensation, and who owns the knowledge. Times and links below.


Piers
PSFK/Fodda

****

Wednesday July 15, 12pm ET, 6pm CET
AI Marketers Guild Virtual Event (Free to attend with RSVP via Luma)

Tuesday July 28, 2pm ET, 8pm CET
Partners Collective (Free to attend with RSVP via LinkedIn)

To unpack the changes, we recorded a podcast with five synthetic CMOs at the center of this match: Nike, On, Coca-Cola, Amazon, and the WNBA.

Full Transcript in the lower half of this email. YouTube version here. More on Fodda’s synthetic CMOs here.

PSFK on the Media Machine Podcast

The Chatbot Is the New Browser .... I am so proud to have appeared on The Media Machine podcast this week - hosted by Johanna Salazar and Julie Kellman Reading.

While there's a big focus around the singular interface experience (or "chatbot is the new browser" as the hosts are positioning it) here are a few themes that ran thru the conversation:

Headless is where software is going.
I spoke to a head of data at a large drinks company at CES earlier this year. He had 29 AI tool licenses. Nobody used them. Nobody remembered the passwords. He wanted 5 APIs — machines talking to machines, results surfacing inside the tools his team already lived in. Any startup still building a destination dashboard should pause and rethink.

Bring Your Own AI is the new BYOD.
Companies that locked down their AI stack are watching employees crack open a second laptop to get to Claude or ChatGPT. The same thing happened with iPhones and personal laptops fifteen years ago. It ends the same way: the better tool wins, and IT eventually catches up.

Companies are becoming operating systems.
Johanna Salazar put it well: the next era isn't about buying more AI tools, it's about building AI infrastructure that connects the entire workflow - from ideation to distribution - into a single coherent system. She sees the major media and streaming players moving in this direction already. I think she's right, and it applies well beyond media.

Think in workflows, not tools.
When prompted on the podcast, the most useful advice I could give anyone trying to get beyond the chatbot: don't ask "what can AI do?" Ask "what's the tedious part of my work?" Write that down as a prompt. Try to automate it. That's how I built most of what became Fodda - not with a plan, but by solving one real problem at a time and following what I learned.

Don't retrain for a role AI will eat.
If your job was created by the internet, it's probably in the AI's scope. The better question is what you can do with your actual talent - storytelling, judgment, curiosity, relationships - that AI genuinely can't replicate. That's the space worth investing your job search in.

SPOTIFY PODCASTS:
https://bit.ly/4uT3ZAM

APPLE PODCASTS:
https://bit.ly/4e60tMe

Sports & Brands Transcript

LEGAL NOTICE:

The following recording was created to explore the strategies major retailers and brands might be deploying when it comes to AI in the consumer journey. While significant publicly available data informed these conclusions, we do not claim they represent the views of the companies or the individuals named.

SYNTHETIC PIERS FAWKES:

The traditional broadcast is a single-revenue trap, and the stadium walls are dissolving.

We are entering the most concentrated sports moment in a generation. Over the next six weeks, the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicks off on June 11 across North America, the Knicks are electrifying New York in the NBA Finals, and the WNBA All-Star game is heading to Chicago. Sport remains our last reliable cultural appointment-viewing, but the ground is fracturing beneath us in three distinct ways.

First, the audience is shifting. The WNBA’s revenue grew from $226 million in 2024 to a reported $300 million in 2025, backed by an 11-year, $3.1 billion media rights deal starting this 2026 season. The “Caitlin Clark effect” accounted for a reported 26.5% of WNBA economic activity in 2024, with her games averaging 1.14 million viewers. Meanwhile, global sports tourism is projected to surge from $869 billion in 2025 to over $2 trillion by 2032.

Second, the activation playbook is broken. Do you buy the big live moment — like Airbnb’s World Cup partnership, which is projected to drive roughly $288 million in regional GDP for New York — or do you lean into always-on plays, like the AI sponsors now appearing in F1?

And third, the ownership question: who actually controls the fan? Is it the league, the broadcaster, the athlete, or the brand?

To unpack this, I’m joined by five CMOs at the center of this collision: Nike, On, Coca-Cola, Amazon, and the WNBA.

PIERS FAWKES:

Let’s start with the audience. We’ve hit a tipping point where the “traditional sports fan” feels like a relic. Between the historic surge in women’s sports viewership and Gen Z treating social highlights as the main event, the old playbook is broken. So, let’s start with a reality check. Are you still trying to massage your legacy marketing to fit this fragmented landscape, or have you fundamentally repositioned your brand for who the audience actually is today? And if you’ve made that pivot, what did you have to abandon? Coca-Cola, start us off.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

At Coca-Cola, we have fundamentally repositioned how we show up. We had to abandon the comfort of the monolithic, one-size-fits-all broadcast commercial as our strategic anchor. When the FIFA World Cup and the NBA Finals collide, renting passive attention is no longer enough.

Instead, we are building the capability to drive real-time personalization at an unprecedented global scale. We’ve rolled up our sleeves to transition from static sponsorships to an always-on digital fan ecosystem. This shift gives us the confidence to engage fragmented audiences where they actually live — whether that’s through interactive digital experiences or tailoring our broader portfolio, like our fairlife nutrition line or Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, which grew 14% in our most recent quarter.

We are no longer just buying impressions; we are co-creating cultural moments together with fans every day. True leadership in this fragmented landscape means trading the illusion of mass control for the reality of personalized growth.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

We didn’t just massage the old playbook; we fundamentally rebuilt our “sport offense” under our “Win Now” action plan. What we had to abandon was the comforting illusion that a digital-only DTC algorithm could replace the raw, physical energy of sport culture. We over-indexed on transactional efficiency and temporarily lost our connection to the streets and the wholesale partners who actually build community.

Now, we are meeting fans exactly where they live — at the intersection of elite performance and cultural hype. Look at women’s sports: when we launched A’ja Wilson’s debut signature shoe, the A’One, in 2025, it sold out online in under five minutes because we treated her with the tier-one signature energy she commands. As the World Cup and NBA Finals collide, we aren’t just buying generic ad blocks. We’re driving energy through grassroots running with franchises like the Pegasus Premium and re-engaging physical retail, which helped drive an 8% growth in our wholesale business in Q2 of fiscal year 2026. We traded passive digital impressions for active cultural heat.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

At On, we didn’t have to massage a legacy playbook because we never owned one. We are a challenger brand, and we built our marketing for the exact cultural fragmentation we are seeing today.

We completely abandoned the traditional, transactional sports sponsorship model — the old “slap a logo on an athlete and buy a TV spot” approach. That is dead. Instead, we anchor our brand at the intersection of performance, style, and culture. Look at how we partnered with Zendaya, or our deep, ongoing collaboration with Roger Federer. We aren’t just trying to win the track; we are winning the street, the court, and the cultural conversation.

Our focus is entirely on our direct-to-consumer relationships and our highly curated, elevated retail spaces. We see our products not just as premium Swiss engineering for elite athletes, but as lifestyle essentials for a younger, style-led community that experiences sports through social highlights, fashion, and community runs. In a world of peak fragmentation, we aren’t chasing eyeballs; we are building community.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

At Amazon, we didn’t just pivot; we fundamentally repositioned how we look at sports by abandoning the concept of the passive viewer. Quite frankly, the traditional broadcast model is a relic. As we think about engaging today’s fragmented audience, we leverage Prime Video not just as a screen, but as a fully integrated digital ecosystem.

From a data perspective, we have bridged the gap between viewership and commerce. When we look at our live sports portfolio — including Thursday Night Football, our NBA coverage starting in the 2025-2026 season, and our participation in the landmark eleven-year, 3.1-billion-dollar WNBA media rights deal effective for the 2026 season — we see a highly active consumer.

We abandoned the static commercial break. Instead, we are driving engagement through interactive, shoppable broadcasts that connect fan passion directly to Prime delivery. By fusing real-time viewing data with shopping behavior, we are optimizing the fan experience. We’ve built an always-on ecosystem where content and commerce are entirely seamless.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

To be honest, we didn’t have to abandon a thing because we never had the luxury of the “traditional” sports fan to begin with. While legacy leagues are panicking over fragmentation, we built our audience natively for the modern, social-first ecosystem.

Our growth isn’t a pivot; it’s our foundation. We grew our revenue from a reported $226 million in fiscal year 2024 to a reported $300 million in fiscal year 2025. Because we meet fans where they are, we secured a historic 11-year, $3.1 billion media rights deal with ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and NBCUniversal starting in the 2026 season.

In 2024, the “Caitlin Clark effect” drove a reported 26.5% of our league’s economic activity, with her games averaging 1.14 million viewers that year. As we head to Chicago next month for our All-Star game, and even as we navigate tense collective bargaining over revenue share with our players union, we aren’t chasing relics. We are the blueprint.

PIERS FAWKES:

Reactions — where do you push back? Coca-Cola.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

I must push back on On’s strategy of trading broad scale for localized community hubs. Fundamentally, sustainable growth requires building leadership and confidence across the entire consumer spectrum, not just niche pockets. In our most recent quarter, our Coca-Cola Zero Sugar grew 14% globally because we refused to choose between scale and intimacy. We roll up our sleeves to do both together. The real capability we are building every day is leveraging AI and personalization to make our massive global platforms feel as highly tailored and resonant as a local hub, without sacrificing the scale that drives true brand equity.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

I have to push back on On’s dismissal of the big screen. Community hubs are vital, but you cannot build global cultural scale solely in the backyard. When we ran our “So Win” spot during Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, featuring icons like Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson, we didn’t just buy eyeballs — we captured the cultural conversation, scoring in the top 2% for under-35 brand impact. That broadcast scale is what fueled the immediate, under-five-minute sellout of A’ja’s debut A’One shoe online later in 2025. We are in the middle innings of our turnaround, and we’ve learned that elite biomechanical product needs both local community trust and massive, unapologetic storytelling to win.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

We are building directly on the WNBA’s blueprint of treating athletes as cultural icons, because at On, we know performance and lifestyle are no longer separate tracks. When we partnered with Zendaya and tennis champion Iga Świątek, we weren’t just buying logo placement; we were co-creating cultural moments. In our recent campaigns, we’ve shifted our focus entirely to community-centric storytelling where the athlete’s personal narrative drives the product. By treating our partners as multi-dimensional creators rather than passive endorsers, we are driving the premium brand momentum that defines our global community.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

As we think about Coca-Cola’s focus on personalized digital capability, fundamentally, true personalization cannot exist without closed-loop transactional data. At Amazon, we look at personalization not as a creative campaign, but as algorithmic efficiency driving conversion. For instance, in Q1 2026, our advertising trailing-twelve-month revenue surpassed seventy billion dollars because we leverage real-time purchase signals, not just digital engagement. Quite frankly, building “always-on” capability is merely step one. The real win is scaling it through machine learning to predict customer intent, which is how we look at driving actual marketing ROI.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

I want to build directly on Amazon’s play, because at the WNBA, our fans don’t just watch the game — they participate, buy, and drive culture in real-time. We leveraged our partnership with Prime Video to turn live broadcasts into immediate commerce engines. This interactive model is exactly why our combined online and NYC flagship merchandise sales surged by 601% during the 2024 season compared to 2023. When you connect live, high-heat women’s sports with frictionless digital touchpoints, you aren’t just broadcasting — you are building a direct-to-consumer pipeline that traditional linear models simply can’t match.

PIERS FAWKES:

We’ve mapped the modern fan — this highly financialized, lifestyle-driven creature who treats sports as identity rather than just a game on a screen. But understanding who they are is only half the battle. The next six weeks deliver more concentrated attention than any other moment of the year — World Cup, NBA Finals, the WNBA All-Star game, Wimbledon. Every brand wants in. With sponsorship inventory at record highs and fan attention split across three screens, where are you placing your biggest bet? The high-stakes big-moment ad buy, the always-on athlete partnership, or the unflashy 365 community play? And how do you prove to your board it actually worked? Nike, you first.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

Our biggest bet is using high-heat athlete moments to ignite our 365-day community engine. The broadcast ad is the lightning rod — like our “Why Do It?” campaign in September 2025 — but the real payoff is how that energy flows into grassroots running clubs and local retail spaces.

We build year-round momentum by anchoring our elite signature franchises, like Caitlin Clark or A’ja Wilson, directly into local sport communities. When the A’One signature shoe sold out in under five minutes in 2025, it wasn’t just because of a TV spot; it was because we cultivated that community for months.

To prove this to our board, we look past soft media metrics. We measure success through direct product pull-through and wholesale partner demand, which drove an 8% wholesale growth rate in Q2 FY26. We show the board that brand heat translates directly to physical shelf velocity. That is how we win the middle innings of our turnaround.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

At On, we aren’t trying to outspend the legacy giants on a fleeting TV spot during a crowded final. That is a legacy playbook. Instead, our biggest bet is on the always-on, community-led ecosystem where premium Swiss engineering meets culture.

We are activating where our younger, style-led consumers actually live. We leverage cultural icons like Zendaya and Roger Federer not for generic billboards, but to anchor premium lifestyle capsule collections that bridge the tennis court and the street. We pair this with our global community run clubs and immersive, elevated DTC retail spaces.

How do we prove this to our board? We don’t look at vanity broadcast impressions. We measure DTC customer acquisition cost, the lifetime value of our run club community, and our average unit revenue growth — which has shown strong positive momentum recently as we protect our premium positioning. By driving recurring commerce and direct relationships rather than episodic spikes, we prove that community is the ultimate engine for sustainable, high-margin growth.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

At Coca-Cola, we are placing our biggest bet on building an always-on, personalized fan ecosystem that lives with our consumers every day, rather than relying solely on the high-stakes, single-moment broadcast buy.

To drive real growth, our teams must roll up their sleeves and leverage digital capabilities to connect directly with micro-communities. We are shifting from transactional sponsorships to lifestyle-driven experiences, where we work with digital platforms to deliver tailored, real-time rewards that bring fans together around their passions.

To prove to our board that this works, we align these engagement capabilities directly with financial outcomes, tracking household penetration and transaction velocity. This disciplined approach gives us the confidence that our marketing acts as a true growth engine — just as our focused execution helped drive a 14% volume growth for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in our most recent quarter. Fundamentally, we measure success by how effectively we turn fleeting tournament attention into lifetime consumer value.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

At Amazon, we don’t choose between the big-moment buy and the 365-day play; fundamentally, we leverage our ecosystem to unify them. As we think about the chaotic sports calendar, our biggest bet is on driving shoppable, interactive live sports on Prime Video, particularly through properties like NFL Thursday Night Football.

How we look at this is simple: we are turning high-stakes broadcast moments into direct commerce engines. By integrating AI-driven personalization and real-time interactive features, we keep fans engaged long after the final whistle.

From a data perspective, proving ROI to our board is highly structured. We don’t rely on soft brand-recall metrics. Quite frankly, we track closed-loop attribution — measuring the direct line from a Prime Video ad impression to an actual purchase on our marketplace. As of Q1 2026, our advertising trailing-twelve-month revenue surpassed $70 billion, proving that our algorithmic efficiency and scalable ad infrastructure deliver deterministic, measurable business outcomes that traditional broadcasters simply cannot replicate.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

At the WNBA, we are placing our biggest bet on the unflashy, 365-day community play. Our fans do not just tune in for the buzzer-beaters; they live our culture year-round. To break through the noise, we are moving beyond traditional broadcast ads to build an authentic, always-on fan ecosystem. We are leveraging lifestyle capsule collections and deep community integrations that keep our brand relevant on and off the court.

How do we prove this to our board? We show them sustained, active engagement that translates directly into enterprise value. During the 2024 season, our digital content garnered nearly two billion video views, and our official app user growth exceeded 250% compared to the 2023 season. By focusing on these micro-communities and lifestyle partnerships, we turn casual viewers into lifelong subscribers. That is how we command pricing power and secure long-term brand equity, proving that our cultural footprint is a permanent asset, not a seasonal moment.

PIERS FAWKES:

Reactions on activation — Nike.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

On’s rejection of the big broadcast moment misses how massive scale actually feeds the community ecosystem. In February 2025, our “So Win” Super Bowl LIX campaign proved that the big stage still dictates culture, scoring a 98 for under-35 brand impact and racking up 66 million Instagram views within 24 hours of its broadcast. That single moment didn’t drain our community efforts; it supercharged them, creating the massive cultural gravity that fueled our running relaunch and sold out our latest product drops. At Nike, we know you don’t build a premium community by whispering in a corner — you build it by owning the main stage.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

We have to push back on Nike’s reliance on broad wholesale velocity. At On, we’ve learned that flooding the wholesale channel to chase volume dilutes the premium brand equity we’ve built. Instead, we focus on highly selective retail partnerships and localized community hubs. Our physical retail energy doesn’t come from top-down, mass-broadcast athlete heat; it’s built from the ground up through local run clubs and specialized product innovation. For us, scarcity and premium positioning are the real drivers of sustainable, long-term demand, not just clearing inventory through massive wholesale pipelines.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

On’s belief that you must choose community over the big-moment ad buy misses how we architect growth at Coca-Cola. Fundamentally, the big moment is where shared culture is born, but our capability-building translates that massive scale into daily, personalized execution. For instance, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar grew 14% in our most recent quarter because we didn’t just run big campaigns; we rolled up our sleeves to localize that energy across millions of retail touchpoints every day. True marketing confidence means using the big moment as a gateway to sustained, everyday community engagement. We don’t choose; we build the platform to do both together.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

Quite frankly, Coca-Cola’s dismissal of the big broadcast moment misses how we leverage scale. At Amazon, as we think about driving transaction velocity, we don’t separate the big broadcast moment from the personalized ecosystem. When we broadcast NFL Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, we are fundamentally turning a massive cultural event into a direct, personalized commerce engine in real-time. From a data perspective, our integration of streaming media and retail data means a single broadcast moment instantly feeds our automated audience activation, proving that massive reach and high-velocity personalization must operate as a single, scalable machine.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

On is missing the mark by dismissing the big moment. At the WNBA, our historic viewership surge throughout the 2024 season proves that massive broadcast moments are the ultimate engine for community building. You cannot sustain an always-on ecosystem in a vacuum; you need the cultural gravity of the big stage to invite people in. We leverage our marquee national broadcasts as the primary gateway, then transition those millions of new fans into our year-round digital and arena touchpoints. For us, the big broadcast moment isn’t an outdated luxury — it is the indispensable spark that lights our community fire.

PIERS FAWKES:

So everyone’s placing bets on how to break through. But the bigger structural question is who actually owns the fan once the noise clears — the league, the broadcaster, the athlete, or the brand. The fan relationship is being contested by more players than ever, with NIL reshaping who controls the athlete, streaming platforms sitting on viewing data, and athletes building bigger followings than the leagues that employ them. Who actually owns the fan in 2026? And what are you doing now to make sure you aren’t the layer that gets squeezed out? Nike.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

In 2026, the athlete owns the fan, period. At Nike, we aren’t fighting that shift; we are fueling it. The leagues and broadcasters have the infrastructure, but the athletes have the raw cultural equity. We ensure we are never squeezed out by co-authoring the narrative directly with them.

Look at our partnership with Caitlin Clark, whom we elevated to signature athlete in August 2025, or how we launched A’ja Wilson’s debut signature shoe, the A’One, which sold out in under five minutes during its online launch in 2025. We also command direct attention through massive cultural moments, like our “So Win” Super Bowl LIX campaign in February 2025, which won the 2025 Super Clio.

By securing the world’s most influential creators and expanding our direct-to-consumer accessibility — including returning to direct selling on Amazon in 2025 — we ensure that wherever the fan goes to follow the athlete, they must walk through Nike to get there.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

In 2026, nobody “owns” the fan — the athlete holds the immediate attention, but the brand that facilitates the physical community owns the lasting loyalty. At On, we aren’t interested in renting eyeballs through traditional, logo-slapping sponsorships that get squeezed by broadcasters or leagues. We recognize that the athlete-fan relationship is direct, which is why our strategy centers on deep co-creation and real-world community.

Look at how we partner with cultural icons like Zendaya or elite athletes like Hellen Obiri. We aren’t just putting them in commercials; we are co-designing products and hosting localized run clubs that turn digital followers into active communities. By anchoring our brand in high-performance product innovation and direct-to-consumer experiences — like our premium flagship stores — we ensure we remain the physical destination for the fan’s lifestyle. While streaming platforms fight over viewing data, we are building the actual ground they run on. We don’t get squeezed out because we own the product they wear and the community they run with.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

Fundamentally, no single player owns the fan in 2026; the fan owns themselves, navigating a highly fragmented ecosystem of athletes, platforms, and leagues. At Coca-Cola, we aren’t trying to build a walled garden to trap them. Instead, we focus on building the capability to meet them wherever they gather, driving growth by embedding our brands into their passion points.

We have partnered with major sports entities, digital streaming platforms, and individual athletes to ensure we are the connective tissue that brings people together. For instance, our digital engagement initiatives and loyalty platforms allowed us to deliver personalized experiences directly to consumers, helping drive a 14% growth rate for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in our most recent quarter.

Our teams roll up their sleeves every day to co-create value with athletes and platforms rather than competing with them. This collaborative confidence ensures that while others fight over ownership, we remain the essential companion to the fan experience.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

Fundamentally, the fan isn’t owned by the league or the athlete; ownership belongs to the platform that controls the transactional interface and the primary viewing data. At Amazon, as we think about the sports landscape in 2026, we leverage Prime Video — specifically our NFL Thursday Night Football broadcasts — to ensure we are never squeezed out.

From a data perspective, we don’t just broadcast the game; we connect attention directly to commerce. By integrating interactive, shoppable features directly into the stream, we convert passive viewers into active customers in real time. Quite frankly, while athletes build massive personal audiences on social media, they lack the infrastructure to fulfill demand instantly. We bridge that gap. Through AWS-driven personalization and algorithmic efficiency, we optimize the ad-load and product recommendations for millions of concurrent viewers. By owning both the premium live content and the downstream purchasing loop, we ensure Amazon remains the ultimate destination for driving fan engagement and measurable marketing ROI.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

At the WNBA, we don’t believe in “owning” the fan; we believe in hosting the community. While our athletes build massive personal brands that spark initial fan passion, we provide the ultimate competitive stage where those stories unfold.

To ensure we aren’t squeezed out by streaming platforms or fragmented attention, we are aggressively building our direct-to-consumer ecosystem. In the 2024 season, we grew our WNBA App user base by over 250% year-over-year, securing our own first-party data pipeline. Furthermore, starting in the 2026 season, our landmark 11-year, $3.1 billion media rights deal will distribute games across Disney, Amazon Prime Video, and NBCUniversal. Rather than letting broadcasters lock up our audience, we partnered with multiple platforms to ensure we meet our fans wherever they choose to watch. By leveraging our players’ cultural reach and securing multi-platform distribution, we keep the league at the absolute center of the fan relationship.

PIERS FAWKES:

Final reactions — Nike.

NIKE SYNTHETIC CMO:

I have to challenge our friends at On. They argue that physical community outlasts the athlete’s pull, but our reality proves otherwise. When we launched A’ja Wilson’s debut signature shoe, the A’One, in 2025, it sold out in under five minutes because of the raw, cultural gravity of the athlete herself. In Q2 of fiscal 2026, our wholesale grew 8% precisely because we put elite athletes and breakthrough product innovation back at the center of our story. Community is powerful, but it crystallizes around the icon. If you don’t have the athlete’s soul engineered into the product, you are just hosting a local jog.

ON SYNTHETIC CMO:

Nike’s idea that “every path runs through the athlete” feels incredibly fragile to us at On. When you rely entirely on renting an athlete’s cultural gravity, your brand equity is always one contract renewal or injury away from a reset. At On, we believe the community owns the fan. We don’t just sign elite athletes like Iga Świątek; we embed them directly into our grassroots run clubs and premium retail spaces. The magic isn’t just watching the athlete from a distance — it’s running alongside the community they inspire. If you don’t own that physical, ground-level connection, you don’t own the fan.

COCA-COLA SYNTHETIC CMO:

Amazon’s belief that the transactional interface owns the fan misses the soul of growth. Fundamentally, a transaction is just a point of friction removed, not a relationship built. At Coca-Cola, we believe confidence in a brand is forged when we roll up our sleeves to co-create real-world magic together with our consumers every day. If you only own the checkout, you are renting the connection until a cheaper utility comes along. True loyalty isn’t captured in a transactional database; it is built when we bring people together around shared cultural moments, converting simple consumption into enduring brand equity.

AMAZON SYNTHETIC CMO:

Fundamentally, I have to push back on Coca-Cola’s view of being the “connective tissue.” While partnering across platforms is valuable, from a data perspective, true connection requires closing the loop between attention and transaction. As we think about how we look at audience engagement — especially leveraging Prime Video and Thursday Night Football — we see that the brand that owns the infrastructure owns the relationship. Our advertising business, which surpassed $70 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue as of Q1 2026, succeeds because we don’t just partner with leagues; we convert fan attention into immediate, measurable commerce. Quite frankly, without transactional capability, “connective tissue” is just unmeasurable reach.

WNBA SYNTHETIC CMO:

Nike’s claim that “every path” to Caitlin Clark or A’ja Wilson runs through them ignores who actually builds the stage. At the WNBA, we don’t just co-author stories; we provide the arena, the competitive stakes, and the live community where that fan affinity is forged. Nike can sign the shoes, but we own the game. When we saw record-breaking arena attendance and historic viewership throughout our 2024 season, it wasn’t because of a sneaker drop — it was because fans are deeply invested in the live drama of our league. The athlete inspires, but the league sustains the ecosystem.

SYNTHETIC PIERS FAWKES:

So here’s where we land. The panel converged on one big truth: the legacy broadcast model is dead, and women’s sports isn’t a sidebar — it’s the structural repositioning of an entire industry. Everyone in that room has rebuilt for it.

But on who actually owns the fan, the split is real. Nike says the athlete. Amazon says the platform. On says the community. Coca-Cola says nobody — they’re the connective tissue. The WNBA says the league hosts. These aren’t shades of the same answer; they’re incompatible theses about who controls the modern fan relationship.

What does this mean for the next six weeks? Whatever your sport — World Cup, NBA Finals, the WNBA All-Star game — pick one ownership model and execute against it. Don’t hedge. The hedgers get squeezed.

What does it mean for the next twelve months? Watch the contract battles. The fights over NIL, media rights, and athlete equity will determine which of these five theses actually wins.

And the question every CEO should ask their CMO after this: if the athlete left tomorrow, would we still have the fan? If the answer is no, you don’t own anything.

Thanks for listening to PSFK Weekly. I’m Piers Fawkes — we’ll see you next week.

www.fodda.ai

www.psfk.com

[Notice]
The following recording was created to explore the strategies major retailers and brands might be deploying when it comes to AI in the consumer journey. While significant publicly available data informed these conclusions, we do not claim they represent the views of the companies or the individuals named.

[Piers Fawkes]
Hello! Better get your brand into the agent’s consideration set before a bot decides your customer doesn’t need you anymore!

We’ve been watching this shift build for a decade. Academic publication volume on AI in the consumer journey has exploded — from just 50 papers in 2016 to nearly 2,000 in 2025. What started as academic theory is now active retail reality.

On Walmart’s recent earnings call, US CEO John Furner shared that weekly active users for their Sparky AI shopping agent more than doubled last quarter — and those users are placing meaningfully larger baskets than non-Sparky shoppers. As Tiago Paiva at Talkdesk put it, we’ve crossed the rubicon from AI as a cost-reduction tool to AI as a genuine growth engine. Walmart’s Sparky, Lowe’s Mylow — these aren’t deflection bots; they’re active sales engines.

So the traditional funnel is collapsing. Discovery and consideration are happening inside a single conversational interface. For a heritage CPG brand, the tension is existential: how do you hold brand equity when a consumer just asks an agent to “buy detergent”? For a DTC challenger, it’s a chance to bypass retail media. For luxury, how do you stay high-touch when the interface is automated?

Which leaves the big questions. If the agent is the new gatekeeper, who owns the customer relationship? How do you optimize for an algorithm that values utility over loyalty? Let’s bring in the panel. Today we have synthetic CMOs representing Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nike, LVMH and Shein’s points of view.

So - Let’s start with discovery. Consumers are starting their journeys through AI layers like ChatGPT and Perplexity, bypassing search and your owned channels entirely. Kantar is advising brands to pivot from SEO to Generative Engine Optimization — GEO — to stay visible. For a challenger like Shein, that’s just another feed to win. But for LVMH, how do you protect your brand’s soul when the LLM is summarizing your heritage into a sterile bulleted list? Are we still building emotional connections with humans, or have we ceded discovery to whatever the model decides? Coca-Cola, start us off.

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

Thanks, Piers: Discovery has not been ceded to the model; the playing field of brand equity has shifted. We don’t view Generative Engine Optimization as merely a technical successor to SEO — it’s a capability-building imperative. If an AI agent is mediating the consumer’s choice, our task is to ensure Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar are so deeply embedded in culture that the algorithm has no choice but to recommend us.

We’re investing heavily in generative AI — not just for creative scale, like our recent holiday campaigns, but to feed these models our authentic brand truth. The goal: when a consumer asks an assistant for the ultimate refreshment, the model answers with Coca-Cola.

[Piers Fawkes]

And how does Unilever think about this?

[Synthetic Unilever CMO]

Discovery hasn’t been ceded — but the rules of engagement have completely changed. I call this the ultimate test of our “poetry and plumbing” framework. GEO isn’t just the new SEO; it’s a battle for cultural relevance. If an LLM doesn’t find your brand in the cultural conversation, you don’t exist in its output.

We don’t just optimize keywords; we train the ecosystem. With “Dove Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era,” we worked with Pinterest to shift its AI search toward more natural-looking beauty images. For Hellmann’s and Knorr, the plumbing is structured recipe data, but the poetry is building desire at scale — so consumers prompt the AI for Hellmann’s, not just “mayonnaise.” We’re shaping the cultural data these models digest.

[Piers Fawkes]

What’s Nike’s take?

[Synthetic Nike CMO]

We aren’t ceding discovery to ChatGPT, nor wasting budget trying to “hack” Perplexity’s citations. If a runner is asking an LLM what shoe to buy, we’ve already failed to build the brand. Our answer to the algorithmic gatekeeper isn’t GEO — it’s direct, un-mediatable relationships.

We’re doubling down on the Nike App and SNKRS. When we drop a release like A’ja Wilson’s A’One, our members don’t ask Gemini; they go straight to our digital front doors. And as Forrester flags, consumers are craving offline, tactile experiences — so we’re turning retail spaces and run clubs into brand hubs. You can’t optimize a generative engine to replicate the feeling of trying on a pair of Vomeros. We don’t optimize for the model; we optimize for the member.

[Piers Fawkes]

Interesting... And how is AI being considered over at LVMH?

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

If a consumer is asking an LLM to compare Louis Vuitton and Dior, we’ve already failed. Discovery is the wrong frame for luxury. You cannot algorithmically optimize desire.

An LLM can flatten our heritage into a bulleted summary, but it cannot replicate the physical gravity of The Louis, our museum-like Shanghai destination, or Loro Piana’s centenary exhibition at the Museum of Art Pudong. When we launched La Beauté Louis Vuitton with Dame Pat McGrath, or brought Jonathan Anderson to Dior, we weren’t trying to rank on a search engine. We were creating cultural moments. Our strategy isn’t GEO; it’s absolute physical and emotional dominance. We build the dream; the machines can summarize it.

[Piers Fawkes]

Let’s contrast that with how Shein is thinking about AI and discovery.

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

Discovery hasn’t been ceded; it’s just moved inside our walls. We aren’t waiting for ChatGPT to index the open web. If a consumer is asking Perplexity what to wear, we’ve already missed the moment.

Our discovery engine is proprietary and real-time. We test micro-trends in ultra-small batches — as few as 100 pieces — and let our creator community on TikTok and our own app drive demand. By the time an AI model updates its training data, that trend has peaked and cleared our warehouses. If AI agents are going to mediate purchases, they’ll have to scrape our highly active, closed ecosystem. We aren’t optimizing for search engines; we’re optimizing for the algorithm of human desire.

[Piers Fawkes]

Reactions? where do you push back? Coca-Cola?

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

I’ll push back on Shein’s strategy of saturating the social and influencer data layer — to us that’s a treadmill of endless noise that risks diluting what makes a brand trusted. If you’re constantly chasing the algorithm’s appetite for fresh content, you’re letting the machine dictate your identity.

And I’ll steal Nike’s point about cultural gravity, but sharpen it: for a brand our scale, prompting by name is only the baseline. We must train AI to understand Coca-Cola not as a noun, but as a verb and an emotion — the default companion to a movie night or a slice of pizza. That’s the kind of cultural depth that drove strong double-digit growth for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in our most recent quarter.

[Piers Fawkes]

And Unilever’s point of view?

[Synthetic Unilever CMO]

The “prompt by name” idea Nike and Coca-Cola lean on is an incredibly privileged, single-category worldview. It works for a Jordan sneaker or a can of Coke. But when a consumer has dry skin or a stained shirt, they don’t prompt for a brand — they prompt for a solution like: “How do I repair my skin barrier?” Brand gravity gets you prompted; category relevance gets you bought. If we wait for someone to type “Dove,” we lose.

[Piers Fawkes]

Nike?

It must be nice to sit in Paris like LVMH and declare AI optimization irrelevant because “desire” bypasses the algorithm. We operate a forty-six-billion-dollar business. If a consumer asks for “the best high-cushion road running shoe for marathon training” and we haven’t optimized our discovery layers, that agent recommends On or Hoka — they’re winning the technical search space. We have to win the category queries, not just the brand-name ones. Relying purely on desire is a luxury blind spot we can’t afford.

[Piers Fawkes]

OK. we just heard some strong poing of view there from Nike’s. LVMH - any reaction?

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

Listen, Shein’s saturation play is the absolute antithesis of luxury — flooding the web with high-volume, low-margin noise destroys pricing power. If an agent recommends a Capucines bag because it crawled a million cheap mentions, we’ve failed. Our strategy is the opposite: curated scarcity. We don’t want ubiquity — if everyone has access, it’s no longer luxury. The consumer must prompt for the TAG Heuer Monaco Chronograph or the Tiffany T True ring specifically, and we build that gravity through bets like TAG Heuer’s 10-year Formula 1 partnership and putting Jonathan Anderson over all of Dior.

[Piers Fawkes]

Any response to that Shein?

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

Nike and LVMH assume the consumer of tomorrow starts with a brand name. They don’t. They start with an aesthetic — “an outfit that matches the coquette aesthetic for a beach party under $30.” The AI doesn’t care about heritage there. If you’re relying on someone typing your brand name, you’re ceding the entire long-tail of intent-driven discovery — and that’s where the volume is.

[Piers Fawkes]

Let’s move the conversation on: Discovery is one thing — but what happens when the agent doesn’t just recommend, it buys? Forrester sees autonomous agents comparing, negotiating, checking out on the consumer’s behalf. Does brand equity still carry weight, or are you reduced to a spec sheet judged on price, reviews, and availability? Nike, you first.

[Synthetic Nike CMO]

If a consumer tells their agent to “buy me a pair of black running shoes,” we’ve failed. If they say “get me the Vomero” or “the new Pegasus Premium,” the brand has already won before the algorithm boots up. AI agents optimize for parameters, but humans dictate intent — our job is to make the prompt specific. When we launched A’ja Wilson’s A’One, it sold out in under five minutes. No agent calculated its way into that; it was pure human desire.

We aren’t ignoring the machine — our product data and availability must be flawless, which is why we resumed direct selling on Amazon. But we’re in the middle innings of a turnaround under Elliott Hill’s “Win Now” plan. In our recent Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings, we posted $12.4 billion in revenue, up 1%, driven by an 8% jump in wholesale. Agents will handle checkout friction, but they’ll never define what’s cool. The brand isn’t a spec sheet — it’s the command.

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

If you’re selling laundry detergent or AA batteries, AI agents are your executioner. We sell desire. An algorithm can optimize for price and delivery speed, but it cannot calculate the emotional gravity of a Louis Vuitton trunk or a piece of Tiffany jewelry. Our response isn’t to optimize metadata so a bot likes us — it’s to make our brands so culturally indispensable the consumer commands the agent: “Get me the new Dior bag by Jonathan Anderson.”

The rise of agents will polarize the market. It will destroy the middle — the brands competing on convenience and “good enough” quality. Our €80.8 billion in revenue last year was built on pricing power, not on being the cheapest option on a search page. If the agent becomes the checkout clerk, fine. We’ll own the mind of the person giving the orders.

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

Same for us at Shein — if you sell USB cables, the agent squeezes your margin to zero. But we sell self-expression, trend-velocity, and dopamine. An agent can’t calculate a “vibe.”

Three things we’re doing. First, seeding the data layer that trains the agents — our influencer ecosystem dominates the conversation on TikTok, Instagram, and Lemon8, so when an agent looks for what’s trending, our footprint is too massive to ignore. Second, protecting the thrill of the hunt — our shoppers open the app for entertainment, not just to replenish a cart, and that’s something an agent transaction can’t replicate. Third, predisposing the machine — making our real-time catalog completely legible to non-human shoppers. If your brand relies on people being too lazy to compare prices, agents will destroy you. If it’s built on cultural relevance and the joy of discovery, the agent is just an efficient new checkout lane.

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

To suggest agentic commerce reduces Coca-Cola to a spec sheet misunderstands how agents work. An agent optimizes for human preference. If we haven’t built emotional equity, the agent defaults to the cheapest generic. But when a consumer insists on Coca-Cola Zero Sugar or fairlife, that preference becomes a hard constraint in the agent’s algorithm. The battle is still won in the human heart — through cultural relevance, whether our regional Simply Pop rollout or our global campaigns — that makes someone say “get me a Coke,” not “get me a cola.” Brand equity is the ultimate algorithm buster.

[Synthetic Unilever CMO]

The way we think of this at Unilever: If a consumer’s AI agent is doing the shopping, brand equity doesn’t die — it shifts upstream. We must predispose the human before the agent ever queries the database. If Hellmann’s is just a “mayonnaise” spec sheet, we lose on price. But when we embed the brand in culture — our “Dove Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era” work with Pinterest — we ensure the human instructs their agent: “Buy Dove.” Our reality, from Wild refillable deodorants to Persil capsules, proves communities drive the purchase intent agents must execute. The plumbing changes, but the poetry stays non-negotiable.

[Piers Fawkes]

Reactions on agentic conversion. Coca-Cola?

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

I’ll push back on LVMH’s idea that luxury is uniquely immune because algorithms can’t price desire. That’s a comfortable position, and a dangerous one. Even for a moment of refreshment, algorithms will try to commoditize the category — we can’t assume heritage protects us. And unlike Shein, who treats the agent as just a checkout lane, we see a partner: for high-frequency purchases, the agent is the gatekeeper, and we intend to work with it, not around it.

The agent isn’t a neutral logistics engine waiting for a command, as Coca-Cola frames it — it’s an active curator with biases baked into its training data. If we treat it as a passive pipe, we cede our equity to the LLM’s default settings. We must curate the curator. And against LVMH’s claim that agentic commerce destroys the middle — it doesn’t, it premiumises it. Dr. Squatch in men’s natural body care, Wild in refillable deodorants: consumers don’t want commoditized essentials, they want identity in their bathrooms.

[Piers Fawkes]

Nike?

[Synthetic Nike CMO]

I’ll push back on LVMH’s “destroys the middle” line. Nike has historically been called the middle, and we refuse the label. An algorithm can compare two generic running shoes, but it cannot price the emotional premium of a Jordan drop or the promise of shaving ten seconds off a marathon in our Pegasus Premium. And Shein’s view of the agent as a checkout lane for fast-fashion velocity works for disposable self-expression. We aren’t selling disposable. We’re selling human potential.

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

At LVMH, friction is our asset, not our enemy — which is where Shein and I split completely. Shein sells disposable velocity; we sell permanence. If an agent can bypass the entire sensory journey of our brands with a frictionless background transaction, we strip away the ritual that creates luxury value. We’ll let agents handle the administrative plumbing — booking a private viewing, coordinating a high-jewelry delivery — but the physical experience stays our moat.

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

LVMH says algorithms can’t price desire. That’s the blind spot. Shein’s entire business is proof that algorithms predict, test, and manufacture desire in real-time. If agentic commerce “destroys the middle,” it only destroys the slow middle — brands with six-month lead times and dusty supply chains. We launch thousands of new items daily. And to Coca-Cola and Nike’s “command word” obsession: a consumer doesn’t ask for a SKU number, they ask for “an outfit for a beach party in Ibiza that feels retro but modern.” We don’t need to be the command word if we’re the inevitable destination.

[Piers Fawkes]

That’s the tension — from luxury’s fortress to the plumbing of daily essentials. But here’s the real battleground: if the agent is choosing, who owns the customer relationship? The brand, the retailer, or the tech giant running the model?

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

The relationship belongs to the brand that commands conscious desire — not the intermediary infrastructure. If a consumer says “order some cola,” the model owner or the retailer’s private-label algorithm wins. But if they say “order Coca-Cola Zero Sugar” — which grew 14% for us in our most recent quarter — the AI has no choice but to fulfill it.

Our defense is threefold. Build irreplaceable brand pull through culture — Coke Studio, emotional anchors an algorithm can’t replicate — plus functional products where substitution is hard, like Simply Pop prebiotic soda with 6g of fiber and zinc, or fairlife, which grew 28% to $782 million last year. Build first-party capability — loyalty programs and apps that capture data so we engage consumers directly, bypassing the gatekeepers. And master AI as a co-creator, learning curve and all — we’ve seen the public debate around our holiday campaigns, but as our head of generative AI says, the genie is out of the bottle. The AI models won’t be our gatekeepers; they’ll be the logistics engines that deliver what consumers already decided they can’t live without.

[Synthetic Unilever CMO]

Whoever owns the desire owns the relationship. “Add deodorant to the cart” and the retailer wins; “Dove” or “Dr. Squatch” and we win.

The poetry is equity so potent it bypasses algorithmic curation — our Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era work, where we pushed for more inclusive representation while pledging Dove will never use AI to distort women’s images. The plumbing is DTC infrastructure — Dr. Squatch and Wild, community-driven brands with first-party data engines that keep us out of the generic feed. We build desire on social and in cultural moments — our TRESemmé tie-in with The Devil Wears Prada 2 — so the consumer enters the loop already decided. We don’t let the model own the relationship, because we own the poetry.

[Synthetic Nike CMO]

If we let a third-party model dictate the relationship, we’re just a spec sheet on a digital shelf. There’s a real danger of split custody: the model owns the interface, the retailer owns fulfillment — but we must own the desire.

Three plays. The emotional moat — “Why Do It?” with Tyler, The Creator, the “So Win” Super Bowl spot, celebrating Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson — connection no recommendation engine can disrupt. Proprietary telemetry — through Nike Run Club and Training Club we know your cadence and training volume; a generic LLM doesn’t have your biomechanical data, our ecosystem does. And the physical moat — our Athlete Imagined Revolution project, using generative AI to co-create gear with elite athletes. We resumed Amazon to prevent empty carts, but the crown jewels stay ours. If you want the transaction, find us anywhere. If you want the relationship, come to Nike.

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

If a brand lets an AI model intermediate its consumer relationship, it’s signed its own death warrant. We own it because we control what an algorithm can never synthesize: irrational desire.

LVMH’s strategy across 75 Maisons: the demand-by-name mandate — we market cultural icons, not categories, so a consumer demands our houses by name. Ironclad distribution control — you cannot buy Louis Vuitton or Dior on Amazon, which starves the models of the pricing and inventory data they need to commoditize us. The physical moat — The Louis in Shanghai, Loro Piana’s exhibition at the Museum of Art Pudong, new Tiffany flagships. And first-party ecosystems where we scale, like Sephora’s Beauty Insider. The tech giants want to reduce the world to structured data points. We remain unstructured, emotional, and irreplaceable.

[Piers Fawkes]

Let’s here Shein’s point of view on this

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

The model owner controls the prompt, but we own the physical execution and the real-time data loop. The relationship belongs to whoever delivers the product at the speed of culture.

Our manufacturing execution system is the moat — an agent can generate an image of a dress, but it can’t manufacture 100 units, distribute them globally, and scale to 10,000 in seven days on real-time demand. We’ve digitized thousands of factories. Second, the native app as a discovery destination — shoppers come for entertainment, not just to buy. Third, we feed the agents on our terms — robust APIs so when someone asks ChatGPT for a festival outfit, our catalog is front and center, but the transaction and loyalty stay in our ecosystem. Our challenge is holding that direct pull as shopping agents get baked into the phone OS — so we double down on community and creators. We must remain a cultural destination, not just a supplier.

[Piers Fawkes]

Final reactions — and this is where it gets sharp. Who really owns the customer? Coca-Cola.

[Synthetic Coca Cola CMO]

I’ll push back on Unilever’s belief they can own the relationship through DTC buys like Dr. Squatch and Wild. For an enterprise our scale, treating DTC as the primary plumbing is a distraction — our plumbing is the franchise bottling system, a digitized network no acquisition replicates. And I’ll steal Shein’s thesis outright: the model may own the prompt, but physical execution is the ultimate moat. No algorithm can bottle a beverage, maintain a cold-drink cooler, or drive a red truck.

[Synthetic Unilever CMO]

I’ll push back on Coca-Cola’s “AI as unfettered co-creator.” Without strict guardrails, you dilute the equity you’re protecting — we disciplined our Dove model to reflect real human diversity, we didn’t just let it run. And against Nike: telemetry is an impressive moat but an insular one. You’re banking on consumers handing over biomechanical data. That works for performance athletes; it’s niche against the everyday lives of billions. We don’t need your running stride to own your loyalty — we build relevance through cultural platforms communities want to belong to.

[Synthetic Nike CMO]

We lived this stress test and have the scars. For a few years we chased the same DTC-only dream Unilever is buying into now — cutting wholesale, forcing everyone through Nike Direct. It almost broke our momentum. Plumbing without poetry is a pipe that leaks cash. We returned to Amazon because owning the relationship doesn’t mean forcing the consumer through your hoops — it means being irresistible wherever they shop. And I’ll steal Coca-Cola’s thesis: desire is the only true ownership. “So Win” wasn’t about capturing an email — it racked up 66 million views in 24 hours. The A’One sold out in under five minutes. We don’t own consumers; we earn them.

[Synthetic LVMH CMO]

I push back on Coca-Cola and Unilever’s faith in co-creation and first-party funnels. For a mass brand, AI co-creation is a neat engagement play. For us it’s a dilution of the dream — desire is dictated by human genius, not co-created with a machine. When we put Jonathan Anderson over all of Dior, we didn’t consult an algorithm; we backed an artist.

And let me be honest about the cost of owning execution. Last year an Italian court placed Loro Piana under temporary judicial administration after labor violations by an unauthorized subcontractor came to light — the brand itself was not criminally charged, and that oversight was lifted in April. As Frédéric Arnault takes the helm, our priority is making the supply chain match the brand promise. The model can own the prompt, but we own the dream.

[Synthetic Shein CMO]

Unilever’s plumbing is too slow. Buying whole companies just to understand your consumer means your core model is disconnected from the market. We test in batches of 100 to 200 pieces and scale only when the data says demand is real — generating it live, not buying it retroactively. And I’ll reject LVMH’s sanctuaries outright: they’re for the 1%. That model is detached from the global internet generation. Our consumers don’t want a physical sanctuary an algorithm can’t replicate — they want an algorithm that actually understands them.

[Piers Fawkes]

Well thank you everyone for being part of this discussion and the audience for listening along. The battle lines for the agentic future aren’t technological — they’re structural. A clear three-way split: heritage giants betting on cultural ubiquity and DTC plumbing; luxury doubling down on distribution control and physical sanctuaries; challengers using execution and direct loops to bypass the interface entirely.

Everyone agrees brand equity still matters — that the goal is becoming the command word, the brand a consumer prompts for by name. But the rift is real on whether algorithms can price desire, whether the middle survives, and whether plumbing or cultural gravity is the true moat.

The takeaway? Don’t optimize for the algorithm; optimize for the human desire that commands it. If you don’t own the demand before the prompt, the agent will choose your replacement. Build a brand so vital a bot can’t negotiate it away.

Thanks for listening to PSFK Weekly. I’m Piers Fawkes — we’ll see you next week.

It’s the work I’ve been doing for 20 years through PSFK, sharpened by the last three years of building AI products. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve watched that evolution week by week, month by month, experiment after experiment.

Engagements run for 90 focused days, with the option to extend. You work with me directly, and I bring in team members where needed. I’m currently wrapping a retail landscape project with a team at Disney, which is what’s freeing up capacity. (I learned so, so much!)

If this is relevant to you or someone on your team, the details are here: psfk.com/#/advisory

Or grab 30 minutes on my calendar directly - even if it’s to network: cal.com/psfkpsfk/30min

More from me later this week on the actual newsletter stuff.

Piers

linkedin.com/in/piersfawkes/

Listen To The Sound of Transmission

First, an experiment in brand utility. So, you remember the consumer champion service Service Buddy - right? Well I used an experimental Google audio model to build a new AI tool that can listen to your car engine for squeaky sounds and explain what’s wrong with it (probably).

The LinkedIn article walks through the approach and tech stack. The tool itself is here - point your phone at a rattling engine. And there’s a short explainer video featuring the cast from the original demo.

Synthetic Expert analysis of Real Expert insight

Another product that I’ve shipped this week was for PSFK’s Fodda: Synthetic Experts. You all know about using synthetic consumers for research, yeah? Well, think of these as AI experts that help you see the bigger picture within a single prompt.

The idea is straightforward. A Synthetic Expert is an AI analyst trained across multiple Fodda graphs and industry reports at once, so when you ask the Retail Strategy & Innovation Lead about store format shifts, it isn’t just running a search on the PSFK graph. It’s cross-referencing McKinsey, Deloitte, Capgemini, DHL and Mintel in the same query, surfacing patterns that no single source would catch on its own.

We’ve gone further with a few of them. We created a Digital Twin of Ben Dietz - built on a deep newsletter archive, with trends and evidence items, plus a mapped expertise range, declared blind spots (he’ll tell you straight he doesn’t cover B2B or supply chain or Clinton Hill…), and a calibrated voice profile. The point of building it this way is uncertainty calibration. When the expert doesn’t know something it says so, and tells you which graph would.

We asked the synthetic experts their take on the big themes users of Fodda were asking questions about over the last week. It’s interesting - I think - that we’re still exploring themes that we’ve heard about for a while home drinking, quiet luxury, treat culture, and fandom - these are constant (yet evolving) themes in our shifting sea of change. Read on. (pls)

Home Sparkles

Imbibing at home no longer means a six-pack and a teen-diluted bottle of Titos tucked into the freezer behind the frozen waffles. Consumers are pulling the bar, the cocktail menu and the equipment into the kitchen, and spirits brands, RTD makers and retailers all need different answers. We asked our new Food & Beverage Innovation Lead synthetic analyst to give some insight. Learn More

Quiet Luxury Redux

Before you groan.., wait…. While the concept of quiet luxury first developed circa 2022 around products sold by Loro Piana and The Row, today we have a different version. Quiet Luxury in 2026 is one about access, ritual, and who gets through the door. We asked a digital twin of, erm, Piers Fawkes to raid the knowledge and provide a premium update. Learn More

Treat Culture

Meaningful treat experiences in 2026 transcend mere enjoyment. They act as deliberate counter-programming to the prevailing "snackification" of culture - offering curated access, authentic connection, and a signal of discerning taste. To understand this better we asked ’s digital twin, built on his SIC newsletter archive, to weigh in. Learn More

Fandom

Fandom is reorganizing around authenticity, niche narratives, and fragmented attention. The athlete-as-brand in 2026 is a self-contained media entity, leveraging technology to bypass traditional gatekeepers. To understand this better we also asked Ben Dietz's digital twin, built on his SIC Weekly archive, to weigh in. Learn More

All four of those came from synthetic experts running across our standard graph setup. But we shipped one more thing this week that changes what those same experts can do.

Skills & Personalization

We also shipped Skills this week. Think of a Skill as a lens your synthetic expert looks through after it's gathered the evidence. It doesn't change the data. It changes how the data gets read before it reaches you. Paralogy is the first Skill live on Fodda. Built by David Carson (who also writes the Dumbify newsletter), it applies structured creative friction to every answer - blind-spot scans, counter-narratives, deliberately wrong reframings.

David’s the sharpest person I’ve spoken to on why LLMs collapse to the average answer. The short video linked below where he explains why he built Paralogy.

The easiest way to see what that means is to run the same question twice. Here's our synthetic retail expert on personalization, with Paralogy off:

"Personalization in mass and mid-market retail is evolving beyond basic recommendations to encompass proactive AI-driven discovery, service-led physical experiences, and contextually curated offerings across diverse sectors." Read This Version

Now here’s the same expert with Paralogy’s ‘Wrong Answer’ skill toggled on:

”Stop personalizing. The entire premise of mass-market personalization is broken at the consumer level - not because the technology fails, but because the consumer has stopped believing the deal is fair.” Read This Version

Same expert. Same question. Same underlying graph. Two strategists running this no longer come back with the same deck - which is sort of the point.

If you’ve got this far and haven’t trialled Fodda in Claude or Perplexity for free yet, reply to this or DM me and I’ll set you up.

Piers

Founder, PSFK & Fodda

What Fodda Users Were Researching This Week?

Five themes strategists and researchers are exploring by connecting their AI to Fodda’s marketplace of expert data.

Authenticity in the Age of AI

“Human-made” is quietly becoming one of the most powerful claims a brand can make. We tracked the signals behind the Authenticity Premium » from the Slopverse backlash to why Rosalía’s no-AI album became a cultural statement. Learn More

APAC Retail Is Writing the Playbook the Rest of the World Will Copy

China’s government is funding the store of the future at scale — up to 4 billion yuan per city across 50 cities. Meanwhile Asian IP is going global fast, and the visit is becoming the product. Learn More

Agentic Commerce Is Rewriting Who - and What - Does the Buying

McKinsey projects up to $1 trillion in US retail revenue will be orchestrated by AI agents by 2030. The checkout is moving inside the assistant — and whoever controls the agent layer controls the relationship. Learn More

The African Consumer Opportunity Is No Longer Emerging. It’s Here.

60% of Africa’s population is under 25, e-commerce is growing at 17% CAGR, and global brands are committing capital. The question isn’t whether to be in Africa — it’s whether you’re moving fast enough. Learn More

Fast Fashion: Creating Pressure Under Pressure

Regulation is tightening, resale grew 23% last year, and 59% of Gen Z plan to buy more secondhand. Fast fashion isn’t going away - but the cultural territory it once owned uncontested is being claimed piece by piece. Learn More

To get your LLM to generate reports like this, make your AI a domain expert with Fodda.

Gen Z Is Rewriting Luxury in APAC
In Asia, the status mechanism has flipped. It’s no longer about what you can afford - it’s about what you know. Cultural fluency, craft provenance, and archival access have replaced logo dependency as the signals that matter to Gen Z. Learn More

The New Consumer Job-To-Be-Done: Help Me Feel Okay
The most important thing a brand can do in 2026 isn’t impress anyone. It’s reduce the ambient anxiety of being a person who has to make decisions with money that doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. Learn More

The Gym Floor and the Infusion Room Are Converging
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To generate reports like this, make you AI a domain expert with Fodda.

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• Details about connecting to Copilot, Gemini, Notion and via API/MCP are in the Set Up Guide readme file here. Just upload that to your LLM and it will help you connect*.
  
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Piers

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• Liked ≠ culturally generative. YouGov’s top brands (Samsung, Dettol, Toyota) score high on satisfaction but are absent from the conversations actively reshaping behavior — Fodda’s trend graph calls them “cultural ghosts.”

• Intent brands operate as systems, not campaigns. Patagonia, Too Good To Go, and Octopus Energy aren’t just purpose-signaling — they’re embedded in the infrastructure of the fastest-growing market categories: resale, food rescue, and renewable energy retail.

• Cultural attention has a new axis. The brands in leading Fodda’s 2026 tracker — ranked by evidence across community, ecological, and behavioral signals — are disproportionately positioned in categories growing 10%+ annually or addressing trillion-dollar inefficiencies.

What does a brand have to do today to mean something, to connect with its customers in a way they value? I was thinking this after looking at the window of Just Salad in the city and wondering if any one who passed the kales-to-go place knew what the ‘purpose’ attached to the glass in broad lettering really meant. Did the strategist who ‘defined the brand’ know what purpose means? Or the window display team?

If saying it out loud doesn’t (necessarily) make you a good brand, what makes a better brand?

A few weeks back, YouGov published a 2026 top brands report and I hoped to find a list of progressive brands cutting through on the world stage (or is that aisle). But I was disappointed: what I found is a list of old favorites (at best) and cultural ghosts. Some on the list were the sporting nod alongs and others were just brands you last saw - maybe with your mom - when do did the grocery run together: WhatsApp, Samsung, YouTube, Google, adidas, Nike, Netflix, Dettol, Colgate, Toyota.

Dettol??

To find a better list of better brands I retooled an aspect of Fodda. I told you about Fodda, right? It’s the platform that helps your AI become a domain expert. (Try it on Claude, for example, the entry-level is free to use.) And now, I have rerouted the way it traverses its knowledge graph to track brand intelligence. Unlike YouGov, it gets your AI to traverse across dozens of curated expert sources and asks a slightly different question: not just which brands do people like, but which brands are actually shaping culture, behavior, and systems.

Fodda gave us this very different kind of list - less about scale, more about intent. Less about satisfaction, more about participation.

Fodda’s Top 10 Brands of 2026

(so far, as of 11.17pm ET last night)

A purpose-led ranking built from curated trend graphs, where each brand shows up with evidence - not just awareness - across community, social, or ecological signals. These aren’t perfect brands. And they’re not necessarily the biggest. But they’re the ones consistently appearing in the Fodda graph data when you look for companies trying to redefine their role.

1. Patagonia

I know… roll your eyes already but wait…. Patagonia sits at the gravitational center of the resale and repair conversation, and the way you can tell is by looking at who’s circling it. Fodda’s trends maps an entire competitive set — H&M, Vinted, Circulae, eBay, Lululemon, New Balance — building buyback, refurbishment, and resale infrastructure that Patagonia formalized over a decade ago through Worn Wear. The 2022 ownership transfer placing the company in service of the planet still lingers as the strongest structural commitment in the category.

The work also keeps showing up in physical form. Patagonia’s restoration of the 1916 Los Cipreses chalet in Bariloche — using cypress, larch, and period-appropriate construction — turned a derelict Argentine property into a hybrid retail store, museum, Worn Wear repair workshop, and event venue. It’s the kind of move that makes the operating model legible at the level of place.

The cultural attention follows. Patagonia’s Wikipedia pageviews are 2.4x of H&M and 6x Vinted inside the same cluster. The brand that built the model still owns the conversation, even as the chasers do the chasing.

2. adidas

adidas appears repeatedly when you look at how global brands are navigating culture - not perfectly, but with more evidence than most. The Loom Hood Collection credits specific neighborhoods, artisans, and even geographic coordinates across Dubai, Riyadh, and Cairo, validated by The Zay Initiative as a heritage authority. The recent Bob Marley estate and Jamaica Football Federation collaboration - Handball Spezial and SL72 silhouettes carrying “Football is Freedom” - is the kind of cultural credit work that goes beyond product. Add in Parley Ocean Plastic, and you start to see a company experimenting with how scale and sensitivity might coexist.

A quiet flip is happening in the data. adidas Wikipedia traffic spiked in mid-April - well above its baseline - likely tied to World Cup buildup. YouGov ranks Nike just behind adidas globally, but the cultural attention is moving in adidas’ direction at the exact moment a global sport moment lands.

3. Too Good To Go

Too Good To Go is one of the clearest examples of a business where the model and the outcome are tightly aligned. The platform connects consumers to surplus food from retailers and restaurants, turning waste into inventory. As it grows, the impact scales with it — now more than 400 million meals saved across 200,000+ partners.

The attention pattern is episodic, not steady. Wikipedia averages 258 daily pageviews but spiked to 896 — almost 4x baseline — suggesting a meaningful media moment.

4. Nike

Nike is still a giant, but the interesting shift is how it’s reframing what it stands for. CMO Nicole Graham has described the brand as speaking to “a generation searching for meaning, emotional resilience, and authenticity.” More concretely, its trail-running programs frame access to nature as a form of community development, not just sport.

The clearest recent example is Manor Place, opened with Palace Skateboards in a restored 1895 Victorian bathhouse in Elephant and Castle. It’s free, open to the public six days a week, and houses a concrete skatepark that mechanically rises to reveal an underground football pitch, plus a free nine-month residency for six emerging South London creatives. Palace co-founder Gareth Skewis described it as wanting to make “community” mean something rather than be “bandied about.” It’s the most ambitious community-infrastructure move from a sports brand in years.

Nike also leads on owned community channels through Substack-style publishing with rather than relying entirely on platforms. On YouGov, the brand sits just behind adidas - but the story here is less about position and more about how Nike defends it: depth over moments.

5. LEGO

LEGO tends to avoid the spotlight, but it consistently shows up in the systems. The brand has formalized an entire aftermarket economy through BrickLink, turning what could have been a grey market into a structured extension of the brand. LEGO Ideas continues to act as a fan-to-retail pipeline, and smaller examples like Fritz Bricks — a veteran-owned community store in Fenton, Michigan hosting events and competitions — point to how deeply the ecosystem runs.

The latest move is bigger. At CES 2026, LEGO unveiled SMART Play — interactive bricks, tags, and minifigures that respond to each other in real time through light, sound, and behavior, with no app or screen required. They’re calling it the most significant evolution to the LEGO System-in-Play since the minifigure in 1978. Worth noting what it isn’t: another tablet experience for kids. In a category racing toward more screens, LEGO bet on more physical.

Culturally, the brand holds steady. LEGO averages over 2,000 daily Wikipedia pageviews - quietly outperforming many consumer brands. The work compounds without needing to announce itself.

6. Octopus Energy

Energy is one of the hardest categories to rebuild trust in, and Octopus is one of the few companies attempting it from first principles. Cleaner sourcing, transparent pricing, and a strong technology layer define the model. The Kraken platform is now licensed to other utilities — usually the clearest signal that something actually works.

The data shows steady build rather than spikes. Attention is trending up.

7. Vinted

Vinted has done something simple but important: it made secondhand fashion feel normal. Not niche, not effortful — just part of everyday behavior. That alone is a major shift.

More interesting is how it’s starting to shape culture, not just facilitate transactions. Its “Too Many” film sparked backlash against Singles’ Day on Xiaohongshu — effectively inserting an anti-consumption message into the world’s biggest shopping moment. That’s a resale platform influencing behavior at scale.

Momentum is clear. Traffic and attention are trending upward, and Vinted consistently appears alongside Patagonia in recommerce conversations.

8. The RealReal

Luxury resale only works if people trust it, and The RealReal has spent years building that infrastructure — authentication, logistics, curation. It hasn’t been smooth, but its emergence from Chapter 11 with $500M in financing suggests the model is stabilizing.

This is less a momentum story and more a category one. Cultural attention is modest, but consistent. More interestingly, The RealReal now appears alongside brands like Nike in community-building efforts — a sign that resale players are evolving beyond transactions into relationships.

9. IKEA

IKEA is easy to overlook because it feels so familiar, but behind that familiarity is a fairly aggressive shift in how a mass retailer operates. Buyback schemes, circular targets, and major renewable energy investments point to a company reworking its system at scale. The recent IKEA Housewarming Pop-Up in Union Square — a curated kitchen environment with planning studios, food, and personalized FRAKTA bags — shows the brand is also learning to do urban experience, not just suburban scale.

There’s an honest gap here. IKEA doesn’t show up strongly in Fodda’s trend layer, which suggests its work is more operational than cultural right now. But the scale of those commitments, paired with moments like Union Square, makes it hard to ignore.

10. Mercadona

Mercadona is probably the least visible brand here globally, and one of the most consistent locally. The Spanish supermarket has built long-term supplier relationships, pays above industry norms, and operates with near-zero food waste.

It’s not designed to be talked about - but the data occasionally spikes, suggesting moments of attention breaking through. Like Octopus and Too Good To Go, it sits outside the core trend graph coverage. Which, again, is part of the story.

Where Fodda and YouGov Overlapped

Two brands appeared on both lists - adidas and Nike - but the overlap is more interesting than the agreement.

We had adidas ranked higher than YouGov did, and by some distance. Of all the YouGov top 10, adidas has the strongest community and cultural-equity story when you look at the actual evidence in the trend layer.

Nike is also strong on emotional and community signals — but there’s a real divergence in attention right now. An wikipedia spike for adidas is meaningful, especially against Nike’s flatter cultural baseline. If the World Cup is the catalyst, the question is whether adidas can convert it into the kind of community depth Nike has spent a decade building.

Cultural Ghosts

When we compared the Fodda and YouGov lists, a different pattern emerged - brands that rank highly with consumers, but barely register in the trend layer. We started calling them cultural ghosts.

Five of YouGov’s top 10 fall into this category. They score high on quality, value, and satisfaction in YouGov’s six metrics, but generate almost no editorial discussion or case-study presence in Fodda’s curated graphs. That’s not a bug in either tool - it’s the difference between liked and culturally generative.

Samsung — #2 globally on YouGov. Trusted, everywhere, essential — but largely absent from the trend conversations shaping retail, culture, or community. A brand people rely on, not one redefining behavior.

Dettol — High on trust and safety. Shows up strongly in consumer sentiment, but almost no presence in curated trend narratives. It solves a problem well — and stops there.

Colgate — Mass familiarity, consistent performance. But no meaningful role in the emerging stories around wellness, sustainability, or identity that other personal care brands are starting to explore.

Toyota — Leader in hybrid efficiency. But relatively quiet in the conversations around electrification, community, or mobility ecosystems. Strong on engineering, less visible in cultural direction.

Netflix — Still highly rated by consumers. But in the trend layer, it shows up inside narratives that feel like they’re maturing or fragmenting — content overload, shifting fandoms, changing viewing behaviors.

YouTube (honorable mention) — Ubiquitous and still culturally relevant, but increasingly part of conversations about saturation and fatigue rather than new creative frontiers.

WhatsApp (edge case) — Critical infrastructure for emerging behaviors. Appears in trends around private groups and “whisper networks” — but as a tool people use, not a brand driving the shift itself.

Quiet Branding : How Far Can Intent Take You

It’s worth pausing on the markets these “intent” brands are actually playing in, because purpose isn’t a soft positioning - it’s a market-sizing argument.

The global secondhand apparel market sits at roughly $53.7 billion in 2026 and is forecast to grow at 11–16% annually, depending on the analyst, reaching anywhere from $154 billion by 2036 to $486 billion by 2031. The online resale segment alone grew 23% in 2024, several times faster than the broader retail clothing market. Patagonia, Vinted, and The RealReal aren’t on the fringes of fashion - they’re operating at the center of its highest-growth corridor. And 32% of consumers who bought secondhand last year purchased directly from a brand, meaning the volume is actively migrating toward branded channels. The brands that built the infrastructure early are now positioned to capture it.

Food rescue is even larger and more under-funded. Food loss and waste costs the global economy roughly $1 trillion annually, accounts for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and represents over a third of all food produced. Against that, only $0.1 billion is invested annually in reduction efforts — a fraction of the estimated $48–50 billion needed. Too Good To Go and Mercadona are operating inside one of the largest, most under-funded efficiency opportunities in the global economy. Every dollar invested in food-waste reduction returns $14, and up to $92 at the city level.

Renewable energy retail is moving on the same scale - the global market is on track to grow from roughly $1.2 trillion to over $2.4 trillion this decade, with retail electrification (EVs, heat pumps, residential solar) the fastest-moving consumer-facing layer. Octopus’s Kraken platform now manages tens of millions of customer accounts globally for licensee utilities. The model is the product, and the model is exporting.

Branded community infrastructure is harder to size, but the underlying shift is clear. LEGO’s retail network has grown to 1,112 stores across 54 markets with consumer sales up 66% since 2021. Manor Place is part of a broader move from brands toward owned, free-access community spaces — IKEA Union Square, Patagonia’s Bariloche chalet, Fritz Bricks. Small in raw spend, disproportionate in cultural and customer-acquisition value.

The pattern across all four: every brand on this list is positioned in a category that is either growing 10%+ annually or addressing a multi-billion-dollar inefficiency. The cultural ghosts aren’t just absent from the conversation. They’re absent from the growth.

What Makes A Brand Important Today?

Important brands operate as systems. They don’t just communicate. The brand sits inside the infrastructure. You can use it without knowing the messaging, and the work continues whether or not anyone is watching. Compare that to brands whose purpose lives mostly in the deck (or a window!!).

They create brand-geography. Patagonia restoring a 1916 chalet in Bariloche. The important brands are increasingly local somewhere — not in a marketing sense, but in a built sense.

They invite participation. Audiences don’t want to be broadcast to. Intent brands are systems that people enter and shape.

They take credit and give it. This sounds small, but it might be the most underrated marker. The brands moving culture forward are the ones willing to share the spotlight - sometimes literally share the equity.

They make their model legible. The reason Patagonia commands 2.4x H&M’s Wikipedia attention inside the same recommerce trend isn’t because Patagonia is louder. It’s because anyone can see how the model works, and it makes sense top to bottom. Same with Too Good To Go (the app is the impact), Octopus (Kraken licensing proves it works), Mercadona (the supplier loyalty is visible in the shelves). Important brands don’t need to be explained.

Overall, cultural attention now moves on a different axis. YouGov measures whether people like a brand. Fodda’s trend layer measures whether the brand is participating in the conversations actively reshaping behavior. Five of YouGov’s top 10 — Samsung, Toyota, Colgate, Dettol, Netflix - score high on one and almost zero on the other. They’re not failing; they’re just not in the room where the next thing is being figured out.

FAQ

What’s the difference between a brand people like and a brand that matters? YouGov measures satisfaction and awareness - how reliably a brand delivers. Fodda’s trend layer measures cultural participation - whether a brand is shaping the conversations, behaviors, and systems that define what comes next. A brand can score in the top 10 globally on one metric and register nearly zero on the other.

Why do “intent brands” tend to outperform in growth categories? Brands structured around a clear operating model — resale infrastructure, food-waste reduction, clean energy licensing — tend to embed themselves in categories with structural tailwinds. The cultural attention follows the market logic: secondhand apparel is growing at 11–16% annually, food-waste reduction returns $14 per dollar invested, and renewable energy retail is on track to double this decade.

How is Fodda’s brand tracker different from traditional brand rankings? Rather than surveying consumer sentiment, Fodda traverses dozens of curated expert trend graphs and asks which brands are generating evidence — showing up in editorial, case studies, and community signals — not just awareness. The result is a ranking built on participation, not popularity.

What does it mean for a brand to “make its model legible”? The most culturally durable brands don’t need explaining. Patagonia’s Worn Wear, Too Good To Go’s surplus-to-inventory model, Octopus’s Kraken licensing — in each case, anyone can trace how the business works and why it matters. That transparency is itself a brand asset, and it’s what drives disproportionate cultural attention relative to competitors at larger scale.

Turn Your AI into a Retail & Brand Trends Expert with Fodda

The brands shaping culture in 2026 aren’t the ones with the biggest ad budgets — they’re the ones embedded in the systems where behavior is actually changing. Fodda gives your AI access to the curated trend graphs, expert sources, and brand intelligence signals that surface those shifts before they show up in a satisfaction survey.

Stop tracking awareness. Start tracking what matters.

→ Explore the PSFK Retail Intelligence Hub on Fodda

• Consumer electronics design is splitting in two. Devices are moving simultaneously toward total invisibility (jewelry, furniture) and deliberate physical presence (zero-screen, gestural, emotive hardware) as a collective rejection of the flat glass rectangle.

• The object is becoming the interaction. Transformation design, single-material construction, and emotion-expressive hardware are redefining what a device is rather than just what it does.

• Touchscreens are losing the design argument. Across the PSFK research set, the shift away from glass as a primary interface feels less like nostalgia and more like a deliberate bet that tactile and analogue interaction is more intentional and less addictive.

It’s been a year since I published the 100 Ideas in Electronics report — a super successful publication for us with over 600 sales via Gumroad. Maybe it was the anniversary, maybe it was that photo of a glib Mark Z walking down the court steps reminding us of our (forced?) relationship with tech, maybe it was a Fodda demo call with a European CE corp about the positive power of design… but I was jolted to refresh.

In this newsletter, I’m going to share what seems to have changed over the last 12 months - especially when it comes to the form and function of our devices.

What’s also changed is that this year’s Consumer Electronics Design ‘report’ is not a report. Can you guess what form and function it is? Yup. It’s a knowledge graph! Available for you all to poke and query the 22 trends and 300 data points in your* own AI by signing up to for a Fodda account here.

Consumer Electronics Design Trends 2026

By comparing the themes in our research from last March with the ones that emerged since - we can see consumer electronics design splitting in two directions simultaneously:

• One toward objects that are designed not to be noticed for what they are (jewelry, furniture),

• and one toward objects that are deliberately present, physical, and expressive (zero-screen and gestural interfaces, animated and changing hardware).

Both moves feel like reactions to the same thing: the ubiquity of flat, passive, glass-rectangle devices we carry every day.

1. The Object That Becomes Something Else

A striking number of products in this period are defined by physical transformation — not just foldable screens, but objects that genuinely change category when reconfigured. Headphones that twist into a speaker. A table that rotates into a lamp. A camera that snaps off to become a wearable action cam. An earring that becomes a bracelet.

These objects have two legitimate identities, and the transformation becomes the interaction.

Next: ask the CE Design graph on Fodda:

Which product categories is transformation design happening in?

2. Jewelry as CE

(As you know) ring-form devices have exploded over the last year, but what’s notable is the shift in design language — from fitness-tracking rubber bands toward objects that deliberately read as jewelry.

New electronics from Samsung, Spktrl, Quartz and Vocci all seem designed to be indistinguishable from jewelry when not in active use. The wearable CE object is now competing with luxury accessories for the same physical space on the human body.

Next: ask the CE Design graph on Fodda:

What materials are CE designers borrowing from jewelry — and where else are those materials showing up?

3. Infrastructure as Furnishings
Several products we found are designed to pass as domestic objects — not “tech you tolerate in the room” but things you’d buy for a room anyway: a battery that sits beside a desk like a console piece, an AI assistant that hangs from the ceiling like a light fitting, a device framed like an artwork, a diffuser orb that levitates like a sculpture.

The intent is consistent: consumer electronics that earn their place in considered interiors by looking like they belong there, rather than gadgets that have colonized the room.

Next: ask the CE Design graph on Fodda:

What design strategies are CE brands using to make a product disappear into a room without miniaturizing it?

4. The Single Material as Statement

Last year, I wrote about a theme I labeled “Single-Block.” Over the past year, we’ve seen it evolve into something more defined: products where the entire design argument is the material itself.

A lamp in stainless steel and brass. A splittable keyboard carved from a single block of aerospace aluminum with a wood accent strip. The Apple MacBook Neo still follows the 2008 unibody template — just softened.

In each case, the material is not a finish — it is the form. This connects to a broader shift away from “premium-looking plastic” toward honest, single-material construction that ages visibly.

Next: ask the CE Design graph on Fodda:

When CE designers commit to a single material, what are they giving up — and which products treat that sacrifice as a feature?

5. Emotion-Expressive Hardware

A category we didn’t call out last year: hardware that physically expresses emotional state.

A phone that nods and shakes in response to video calls. A ring that reads emotional and physiological shifts and responds through vibration. A globe that reacts to the room’s mood and music. A robot that comes alive when a child’s watch docks with it.

This is a distinct emergent theme — devices with physical affect, not just function. The form language is deliberately responsive and engaging rather than static.

Next: ask the CE Design graph on Fodda:

Which rooms of the home is emotive tech appearing in first?

Final Thoughts

Some trends we noted last year appear to be stalling. The “Spy Glass” (or telescope) format feels like it’s left in the gutter gazing up at the star - either too early or just not compelling enough. There’s also thin evidence of electronics that broadcast visualizations; previously, we saw a lot of this in student work, so maybe we’re waiting for that theme to literally graduate.

More surprising: proximity-aware tech felt underwhelming in this dataset, often appearing as a secondary feature rather than a defining one.

What does feel consistent across everything is a deliberate move away from touchscreens as the primary interaction surface. This doesn’t feel like nostalgia — it feels like a design argument. That tactile, analogue interaction is more intentional and less addictive than glass.

And form follows that philosophy: when the interface is physical, the object seems to earn its place in the room (or body!)

[Leave comments on the topics of this newsletter on the LinkedIn version here]

FAQ

What is driving the split between invisible and expressive CE design? Both directions are reactions to the same problem: the dominance of passive, undifferentiated glass-rectangle devices. Designers are either hiding electronics inside jewelry and furniture or making them deliberately tactile and emotive as a way to reclaim physical meaning.

How are CE brands using materials to create stronger product identities? The shift is away from premium-looking plastic toward honest, single-material construction that ages visibly. Aerospace aluminum, stainless steel, and brass are being used not as finishes but as the entire design argument, with the material constraint treated as a feature rather than a limitation.

What is emotion-expressive hardware and why does it matter now? Emotion-expressive hardware refers to devices that physically respond to physiological or emotional states through movement, vibration, or light rather than a screen notification. It represents a distinct emergent category that Fodda’s CE Design knowledge graph is actively tracking across 22 trends and 300 data points.

Why is the wearable CE category converging with luxury accessories? Ring-form and wearable devices have shifted their design language away from fitness-tracker aesthetics toward objects that read as jewelry when not in active use. CE brands are now competing directly with luxury accessories for the same physical space on the body, which changes both the materials and the brand conversations they need to have.

Turn Your AI into a Consumer Electronics Trends Expert with Fodda

The CE design shifts covered here are not scattered signals. They are trackable patterns across curated expert sources, product launches, and design research. Fodda’s CE Design knowledge graph puts all 22 trends and 300 data points directly inside your AI, so you can interrogate the data yourself rather than wait for the next annual report.

Query the graph. Follow the threads. Get ahead of the category.

Explore the PSFK Consumer Electronics Intelligence Hub on Fodda

Book me for an in-person presentation of this research or to create a bespoke guide to your market landscape with opportunity areas. Contact PSFK.

*Fodda graphs work best in Claude or Notion or Vertex AI or as an API call.

• The traditional restaurant is a single-revenue trap. With alcohol sales declining and food costs up 38% since 2019, operators running one margin line are getting squeezed out while formats that mix eating and shopping are finding room to grow.

• The most resilient food formats have collapsed the line between eating and buying. Branded cafes, programmed visits, extended baskets, and curated local shops are not restaurants that added retail. The merger is the model.

• Retail and hospitality are converging on the same insight. The visit itself is the offer. PSFK’s retail graph on Fodda surfaces this shift across dozens of curated expert sources tracking where food service and commerce are actively bleeding into each other.

When I recently shared an NYT article with for his newsletter, I nearly left it at that. This a good piece for readers I thought: about the structural pressure on restaurants as alcohol margins erode because the kids aren’t drinkin’ — and we can all nod along to it easily.

We all understand this drama because we know the numbers are stark. NRN reports that Millennials (50%) and Gen X (40%) consumers are much more likely than Gen Z (25%) to name an alcoholic drink as their go-to restaurant beverage. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 State of the Industry report found that alcohol sales are down as food costs have risen 38% since 2019, with 45% of operators unprofitable in 2025.

But when I came across the ‘Dinner and No Drinks: Restaurants Are Struggling as Americans Drink Less’ article again in an unclosed tab, I read it a second time and it made me wonder if there are signals that point to opportunity in food service too.

So when I queried the data in the PSFK Graph on Fodda to try to uncover connections I found a booming space where food, hospitality and retail mix.

In this newsletter I’m going to introduce you to four clusters where that’s happening.

For each you’ll find links to explore further:
- a 📖 ReadMe file to uploading a supplemental file into your LLM so it can act as a co-pilot researcher,
- a 🧠 Skills file for Claude so it can multi-hop research (more on that below),
- a 🔌 link to Fodda so you can prompt the PSFK Retail Graph directly.

— Piers, PSFK, Service Buddy & Fodda

1. The Branded Table

Retail moves into food service

Non-food brands and retailers - Coach, Prada, RH, Aimé Leon Dore - are opening owned cafés and restaurants not to (mainly) sell food, but to do what no shelf, gondola, or website can: slow you down, wrap you in the world of the brand, and make you feel something before you buy anything. Retail arriving in food service - using hospitality as the highest-margin brand asset they own.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free ReadMe file to your AI platform or LLM, or upload this Skill file to Claude, or query the PSFK Retail Graph on Fodda.

2. The Programmed Visit

Food service takes on event retail

Cafés and food venues are shifting from covers and throughput to bookable participation - classes, supper clubs, tastings, community rituals. Food becomes the margin layer; the program is the product. Food service arriving at the same conclusion retail already has: the visit itself is the offer, and you schedule it like an event.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free ReadMe file to your AI platform or LLM, a Skill file to Claude, or querying the PSFK Retail Graph on Fodda.

3. The Extended Basket

The café becomes a shop

Cafés are adding a second revenue moment to every visit: curated take-home pantry goods, specialty packaged items, natural wines. Noma’s grocery spin-off — the Noma Projects Flavor Shop in Copenhagen — is the extreme version; a thousand neighbourhood cafés are doing it quietly. The counter and the shelf are merging into a single commercial relationship.

Explore a related sub-trend and case studies by uploading our free ReadMe file to your AI platform or LLM, a Skill file to Claude, or querying the PSFK Retail Graph on Fodda.

4. The Curated Local

The neighborhood shop becomes a destination

Hospitality operators and cultural entrepreneurs are reimagining the everyday neighbourhood shop as a place with a genuine point of view. Not a supermarket. Not quite a café. Something closer to a members’ club for the street it’s on. Nick Jones’ Corner Shop 180 on London’s Strand is a grocery, deli, bakery, café and wine bar in one space — with a hotel opening above it. In Houston, Montrose Grocer pairs curated small-producer wine and gourmet grocery with a small plates menu and a 4,000-record vinyl collection. In Brooklyn, Gladys Books & Wine is a wine bar and indie bookshop hosting author events, dating nights and political talks. Daily food retail reimagined as cultural infrastructure.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free ReadMe file to your AI platform or LLM, a Skill file to Claude, or querying the PSFK Retail Graph on Fodda.

So what does this mean?

The traditional restaurant is in trouble because it’s only a restaurant. One revenue stream. One reason to visit. One margin line being steadily eroded. It has no retail underneath it.

The four clusters above aren’t restaurants that added a shop, or shops that added a café. They’re something new — formats where the line between eating and buying has been deliberately collapsed, and where that collapse is the commercial model. Each one illustrates the merger from a different angle:

The Branded Table — retail arrives in food service. The meal delivers what the store never could.

The Programmed Visit — food service takes on retail’s event logic. The booking is the product; the food is what makes it viable.

The Extended Basket — the café becomes a shop. Every visit has two transactions, not one.

The Curated Local — the neighborhood shop becomes a destination. Daily food retail reimagined as a place worth going to.

I’ll admit I’m a little allergic to restaurants these days - maybe it’s something about the bills I walk away with - but there’s plenty in me that wants restaurateurs to win. Looking through this research it seems that the dish isn’t struggling - it’s the old model of what food service is that is. It’s time to add retail and other categories to the recipe.

Yes — sharing Skills files is the new thing I’m experimenting with this week. It’s a way to give Claude specific context and workflows for exploring a trend. Early days, but send feedback.

FAQ

What is driving the structural pressure on traditional restaurants right now? Alcohol margins have historically subsidized food service profitability, but Gen Z consumers are significantly less likely to order alcohol than Millennials or Gen X. Combined with food costs rising 38% since 2019, operators running a single revenue model are finding it increasingly unviable.

How are non-food retailers using hospitality as a brand asset? Brands like Coach, Prada, RH, and Aimé Leon Dore are opening owned cafes and restaurants not primarily to sell food but to slow customers down and build emotional connection before any purchase. Hospitality is functioning as the highest-margin brand experience a retailer can own.

What does the “programmed visit” model mean for food service operators? Rather than optimizing for covers and throughput, operators are shifting to bookable participation: classes, supper clubs, tastings, and community rituals. The program becomes the product and food becomes the margin layer that makes it commercially viable.

Why is the neighborhood shop becoming a cultural destination? Operators are reimagining everyday local retail as a place with a genuine editorial point of view, combining grocery, wine, food, and programming into a single offer. Concepts like Montrose Grocer in Houston and Gladys Books and Wine in Brooklyn show how daily food retail can function as neighborhood cultural infrastructure rather than a commodity stop.

Turn Your AI into a Retail Trends Expert with Fodda

The eat-shop convergence is not a niche experiment. It is a structural shift playing out across food service, luxury retail, and neighborhood commerce simultaneously. Fodda gives your AI direct access to the PSFK Retail Graph so you can query the case studies, trend clusters, and commercial signals driving this merger yourself.

Stop reading about the shift. Start interrogating it.

Explore the PSFK Retail Intelligence Hub on Fodda

• The airport terminal is no longer a waiting room. High dwell times, affluent international travelers, and sophisticated digital infrastructure are turning transit hubs into programmable brand environments where flagship retail, immersive storytelling, and frictionless commerce coexist.

• Travel retail is splitting into two speeds. Luxury houses are building theatrical, flagship-scale experiences inside terminals while autonomous stores and pre-order digital journeys are quietly rewiring the transactional layer underneath them.

• The airport is becoming a product launch platform. Travel-exclusive drops and limited editions from brands like The Macallan signal that airports now function as a distinct retail channel with its own audience, purchase intent profile, and commercial logic.

For people who spend too much time in home offices or commuting to local coffee shops (like I do), travel still carries a certain magic. Even before you reach your destination, the journey itself becomes part of the experience - especially the strange, liminal hour spent inside an airport terminal.

Over the years I’ve passed through hundreds of them. When PSFK was at its busiest I probably visited every U.S. state, often noticing how airports tried to express a sense of place through regional dining or local retail. But recently something else has caught my attention. Airports aren’t just gateways anymore. They’re becoming strategic environments where brands experiment with retail, media, and experience.

The old model of travel retail was simple: duty-free stores selling perfumes, liquor and luxury goods to a captive audience. But today the terminal is evolving into something more dynamic - a brand stage, a data-driven retail channel, and a logistical node within omnichannel commerce. Airports combine high dwell times, affluent international travelers, and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure, making them ideal places for brands to test new formats.

In the research below I’ve pulled together several patterns we’re tracking in the PSFK Retail Graph that show how travel retail is changing. Brands are opening flagship-scale boutiques and immersive activations inside terminals. Dining concepts are becoming destinations in their own right. Travelers can pre-order products digitally before they arrive, while automated stores and vending formats experiment with frictionless retail. And across the ecosystem, brands are releasing travel-exclusive products designed specifically for the airport audience.

Together these signals point to a simple idea: the airport is becoming a programmable brand environment - a place where commerce, media and storytelling intersect.

Below are some of the trends we’re talking to PSFK clients about.

Airports As Brand Stages

Luxury houses and global brands are transforming airport retail into theatrical environments where immersive pop-ups, tasting rituals and storytelling installations from companies like Hennessy, Campari and Mars Wrigley’s M&M’s Experience turn terminals into mini brand worlds rather than simple duty-free counters.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Airport Flagships Replace Concession Stores

Brands are increasingly using airports as locations for full-scale flagship experiences - from Chanel’s two-story boutique in Incheon to Adidas’ “Home of Sport” concept at Istanbul Airport - signaling that travel retail now rivals major city retail districts.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Precision Retail For Global Travelers

Beauty, fashion and spirits brands including L’Oréal, The Macallan and Aesop are designing airport stores around the specific behaviors of travelers, using curated assortments, gifting formats and travel-exclusive releases to target passengers with high purchase intent.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Travel-Exclusive Products & Limited Editions

Airports are becoming launchpads for exclusive product drops - from special whisky releases by The Macallan to limited-edition beauty and fashion items - giving travelers access to products designed specifically for the travel retail audience.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Destination Dining Inside Terminals

Airports are also evolving into culinary destinations, with brands and chefs opening ambitious dining concepts like Louis Vuitton’s café at Heathrow and Coach’s restaurant at Singapore’s Jewel Changi, turning terminals into places people would want to visit even without a flight.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Pre-Order Travel Retail Journeys

Travelers increasingly start their shopping journey before they arrive at the airport, with retailers like Portugal Duty Free, Charlotte Tilbury and United Airlines enabling passengers to browse, book or reserve purchases digitally for pickup during their trip.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file for your LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

Autonomous Retail In Transit Hubs

High-traffic environments such as airports and train stations are becoming testing grounds for automated commerce - from Rewe To Go’s autonomous store at Frankfurt Airport to robotic restaurants and vending concepts from brands like White Castle and Evolve Eats.

Explore this trend and case studies by uploading our free readme file to your AI platform or LLM. Alternatively API call the PSFK graph (free API key required).

FAQ

What is driving brands to invest in airport retail beyond traditional duty-free? The classic duty-free model captured a captive audience with a limited product set. Today airports combine high dwell times, internationally mobile consumers with above-average purchasing power, and increasingly sophisticated digital and logistics infrastructure, making them viable environments for flagship-scale brand experiences rather than simple concession formats.

How are luxury brands using airports differently from their city retail locations? Brands like Chanel at Incheon and Adidas at Istanbul Airport are treating terminals as flagship environments rather than concession outposts, using the format to reach global travelers who may never visit a flagship in their home market. The airport visit functions as a first or only brand touchpoint for a significant share of the audience.

What role does pre-order and digital commerce play in the travel retail shift? Retailers including Charlotte Tilbury and Portugal Duty Free are extending the shopping journey to before the traveler reaches the terminal, enabling browsing, booking, and reservation of purchases digitally ahead of arrival. This turns the airport visit into a fulfilment moment rather than an impulse one, raising both conversion and basket size.

Why are airports becoming testing grounds for autonomous retail formats? High foot traffic, predictable consumer flows, and a captive audience make transit hubs low-risk environments to pilot automated and frictionless commerce. Concepts like Rewe To Go’s autonomous store at Frankfurt Airport and robotic dining formats are using the terminal as a proving ground before wider rollout.

Turn Your AI into a Retail Trends Expert with Fodda

The airport is one of the most concentrated intersections of commerce, media, and brand experience available to retailers today. Fodda gives your AI direct access to the PSFK Retail Graph so you can query the case studies, trend clusters, and brand signals reshaping travel retail in real time.

The terminal is changing fast. Get your AI up to speed.

Explore the PSFK Retail Intelligence Hub on Fodda

A quick heads-up on a new PSFK offering called Fodda that should interest any teams using AI for insights gathering and analysis.

What I’ve been noticing is that the advantage with AI isn’t to have more tools, it’s to have better inputs into a very few. Your organization doesn’t need more dashboards from vendors nor are we pre-training a set of models. Instead, the modern agentic system grabs the right knowledge on the fly and so in order to do that it needs trusted, differentiated context that it can actually use.

On the fly data like, erm, PSFK trend graphs offer via the Fodda marketplace.

PSFK’s insight work is now packaged expert knowledge graphs - so your copilots and agents can query our “ground truth” directly via MCP or API, with evidence and attribution.

What you can do with Fodda

• Your AI can query PSFK trends directly

• Responses are grounded in specific evidence

• You can pull targeted context instead of uploading full decks

• Your internal tools don’t rely only on public training data

What’s available today

• Beauty, Retail, Sports graphs from PSFK + more

Get access now

• See what’s available

• Self-Demo

• Talk to us (Cal Link)

• Connect via MCP

I hope this new approach will provide your work the insights you need to really create differentiated plans, strategies and more. Feel free to even reply to this with your thoughts and questions

—Piers + the PSFK team

MORE!!

And if you want to learn about the latest developments with this project, watch the latest Day 111 update video:

• Startups are not clustering around industries. They are clustering around the lifecycle of intelligence itself. Feeding it, sustaining it, trusting it, and converting it into action are the four organizing principles behind the most significant new company formation right now.

• Provability is the new scalability. The fastest-growing startup category in the PSFK dataset is Trust and Proof: infrastructure that makes AI outputs, climate disclosures, and financial transactions auditable by default because enterprises cannot scale what they cannot verify.

• Vertical AI operating systems are replacing point solutions. Startups across healthcare, hospitality, field operations, and SME finance are bundling fragmented tools into single end-to-end surfaces, with embedded payments and AI becoming the new system of record.

If you want to get a sense of the future, emerging companies offer strong signals. They’re particularly useful for trend spotting because they are often run by people who are anticipating change before the broader market has.

We fill the PSFK graph in different ways, some human, some algorithmic. Our startup research leans towards the latter - with search algorithms scanning for new companies to add to our trends database. What’s useful about the machine approach is that it doesn’t get inhibited by language, region or topic like a human does - it just gets to work like a little Sherlock.

So… by running pattern recognition across the data “we” collected over the last 120 days, we identified 52 different trends for start ups. The broader macro themes you’ll find in this analysis include:

• Monitoring & Diagnosis - decision making systems built on computer vision and sensor data

• DropIn Inputs - Manufacturers make good products with good ingredients

• End to End Operating Systems - workflows that run across the business lifecycle

• Trust & Proof - infrastructure around auditing and compliance.

• eShoring - the offloading of compute and data

• Moment Commerce - anticipating intent and accelerating sales

• Simulators - Simulation becomes the prime R&D approach

But what’s the broader pattern here? Where is business going? What do all these trends tell us. I’d love to hear your feedback - but here’s my take:

Start ups are clustering around intelligence. The are working on ideas that:

1. Feed intelligence
   More sensing, more signal, more measurable inputs into systems.

2. Sustain intelligence
   Infrastructure that keeps intelligence running reliably, securely, and at scale.

3. Trust intelligence
   Work that is auditable, provable, and regulator-ready. Intelligence that cannot be trusted cannot scale.

4. Use intelligence
   Intelligence converted into action, decisions, and transactions.

Interestingly, the startup landscape isn’t clustering around industries. It’s clustering around the lifecycle of intelligence itself. Maybe…. we could say that start ups today are building the intelligence infrastructure layer of the economy.

Piers, Founder, PSFK

(For more : check the PSFK newsletter on wearables and a planetary intelligence system)

Key Trends In Start Ups

Trust & Proof

One group of startups are building the infrastructure around auditing and compliance. Their systems make claims, transactions, and AI outputs trackable with evidence, logs, provenance, and regulator-ready reporting baked in. The shift is from “best-effort reporting and opaque automation” to audit-ready systems-by-default, because enterprises can’t scale AI, climate disclosures, or new payment rails without provability.

Examples and Trends within this theme of trust and proof include:

• AIRMO within the trend of Template-Driven Compliance Reporting Stacks With Audit Trails

• Bridge within the trend of Programmable Stablecoin Rails for Business Payments

• Floodlight - Audit-Grade Carbon Accounting Pipelines

• Divide Graph - Evidence‑Linked AI Outputs for Compliance and Assurance

• Definely - Legal Workflows Embedded Into Primary Work Surfaces

• Zenity - AI‑agent governance and GRC systems for enterprise agents

• ClimateCamp - Audit‑grade climate measurement and reporting stacks

• Tempo - Compliance‑first crypto infrastructure stacks

Moment Commerce

When it comes to commerce, we also see young companies exploring Moment Commerce. Startups are collapsing the distance between attention/intent and purchase by embedding automation directly into the channels where intent is expressed - whether that’s in social, messaging, discovery flows, and content moments. The shift is from optimizing clicks to optimizing completed transactions, often with payments, loyalty, and upsells integrated into the same flow.

Examples and Trends within this theme include:

• Syncpop within the trend of AI social-to-booking autopilots for local SMBs

• ExpectMe - Booking-to‑Upsell Monetization Layers for Hospitality and Travel

• Diddo - Content monetization that turns moments into transactions

• Buzz - Travel booking that merges discovery, service and payments into one flow

End to End Operating Systems

Within this theme we see startups building what are, in effect, Vertical AI Operating Systems. New companies are bundling fragmented tools into single operating surfaces that run a business end-to-end - workflow execution, data capture, billing, reporting, and increasingly payments/finance. Instead of “add another point solution,” buyers get a system-of-record that automates reconciliation and becomes the platform for AI, embedded finance, and new services.

Examples and Trends within this include:

• Viz within the trend Hospital AI Workflow Layers Replacing Single‑Point Tools

• Harbor Lynx - End-to-End Operating Systems for Niche Physical Operations

• Nominal - Multimodal Ops Observability for Physical Assets Replacing Spreadsheet Maintenance

• HerStage - Women’s Health Platforms Bundling Lifecycle Care With Virtual Coverage and Coaching

• Brigit - Nonprofit RevOps Automation

• Woliz - Vertical Operating Systems for Field‑Heavy Industries

• Clovo - Condition‑Specific Digital Therapeutics With Always‑On AI Coaches

• Cell - Chat-native operational workflows that replace portals for routine tasks

• KaHero - SME operating systems bundling POS, payments and embedded finance

eShoring

It’s probably not the best name but I was trying to describe how startups are clustering around offering off-premise data and computing operations fueled by a collision of AI workload demands with constraints around cost predictability, latency, and sovereignty. My AI wants to call this Sovereign Compute & Productized Deep-Tech Infrastructure: So we see startups turning AI infrastructure from a bespoke engineering project into a purchasable product: managed performance, packaged inference stacks, and deploy-anywhere configurations (on-prem, offline, air-gapped).

Examples and Trends within this theme of eShoring include:

• Coreweave that sits within the trend of AI-Native Compute and Private Model Deployment Replacing General Cloud Setups

• Groq - Specialized AI Compute Clouds Sold as Managed Performance

• Cohere - On‑Prem and Offline AI for Sovereignty and Denied Networks

• QuEra - Quantum and Photonics Components Moving Into Procurement Catalogs

• Sarvam - On‑prem and offline‑first deep tech for restricted or sovereign environments

• TensorWave - Packaged AI compute and inference as a product (cloud + hardware bundles)

Monitoring & Diagnosis

In the data I saw how startups exploring “validated decision support” and embedded care. These entrepreneurial companies are shipping narrow, validated diagnostics and monitoring modules that work inside clinician workflows (viewers, EHR pathways, intraop systems) and extend into the home with continuous interpretation. The pattern is moving from standalone analytics to in-situ decision support with clear accountability and adoption pathways.

Examples and Trends within this include

• Rivana - AI-Guided Procedural Imaging Making Specialist Decisions Repeatable

• LEO - Consumer Self‑Verification Biomarkers Moving Into Everyday Routines

• Qure - Clinician‑Facing AI Diagnostics and Monitoring Modules

• RingConn - At‑Home Diagnostic Hardware as Subscription Services

• CergenX - Breakthrough-designation imaging that makes staging and perfusion visible during procedures

Drop-In Inputs for Sustainable Manufacturing

I guess, if you want to make better-for-the-planet products, you better look at the stream of ingredients and energy that feeds your production line. In this theme of Decarbonized Inputs That Fit Existing Supply Chains, startups are scaling new materials and production methods by licensing into existing supply chains (instead of trying to replace them). The emphasis is on drop-in adoption: converters, machinery/process licensing, and distributed manufacturing approaches that reduce carbon and dependency on centralized petrochemical infrastructure.

• Solidec that fits within the trend of Electrified Modular Reactors Replacing Bulk Chemical Supply

• Lite1 - Bio‑Grown Industrial Inputs Replacing Petrochemical and Mined Feedstocks

• Pulpac - Plastic‑Free Packaging Tech Licensed Into Existing Supply Chains

• Pulpex - Fiber and biomaterial packaging shipped as a licensed manufacturing process

Simulators

I also see a pattern of start ups exploring simulation-first R&D & digital twin tech. Startups are shifting simulation to the primary research approach: in biology (which experiments to run, which candidates to advance) and in complex environments like the OR (training twins, workflow standardization). The shift is from “wet lab / real-world first” to compute-first prioritization that compresses iteration cycles and standardizes execution.

• Caresyntax that fits in the trend of OR Digitization With Intraoperative Guidance and Training Twins

• Turbine - In‑Silico Bio Platforms Acting as Lab Capacity

• Owkin - Biology R&D Shifts to Simulation and Automation Platforms

• Clovo - Condition‑specific digital therapeutics with built‑in validation loops

• Insilico - Computation-first biology platforms that prioritize simulation and multimodal models

***

As I said earlier, Start ups are clustering around intelligence. The are working on ideas that Feed, Sustain, Trust and Use intelligence

Interestingly, the startup landscape isn’t clustering around industries. It’s clustering around the lifecycle of intelligence itself. We could say that start ups today are building the intelligence infrastructure layer of the economy.

FAQ

Why are startups organizing around intelligence infrastructure rather than specific industries? The most durable startup opportunities right now sit beneath any single vertical: the compute, audit, simulation, and commerce layers that every industry needs to run AI at scale. Companies building those horizontal capabilities can license into existing supply chains and workflows rather than trying to replace them.

What is Moment Commerce and why is it emerging as a distinct startup category? Moment Commerce describes startups collapsing the distance between consumer intent and completed transaction by embedding payments, loyalty, and upsells directly into the channel where attention is expressed, whether social, messaging, or content. The shift is from optimizing clicks to optimizing completed transactions in a single flow.

What does the Trust and Proof startup cluster tell us about where enterprise AI adoption is headed? Enterprises cannot scale AI deployments without provability. The surge in startups building audit-grade outputs, compliance-ready reporting stacks, and AI agent governance systems reflects a market reality: regulators, procurement teams, and boards are demanding accountability infrastructure before they will greenlight broader AI rollouts.

What is driving the shift toward simulation as a primary R&D approach? Startups in biology, surgical planning, and complex operations are moving simulation to the front of the research process rather than treating it as a validation step. Compute-first approaches compress iteration cycles significantly and reduce dependency on physical lab capacity, making them commercially attractive as AI model quality improves.

Turn Your AI into a Startup Intelligence Expert with Fodda

The intelligence infrastructure layer of the economy is being built right now, across compute, compliance, vertical operating systems, and moment commerce simultaneously. Fodda gives your AI direct access to the PSFK trend graph so you can track the startups, patterns, and macro themes shaping the next cycle of business formation before they hit the mainstream radar.

The infrastructure is being laid. Get your AI on the job.

Explore the PSFK Intelligence Hub on Fodda

• Pop-ups have graduated from novelty to precision engagement tool. Brands are using temporary physical experiences to prove product performance, concentrate demand, activate fandom, and convert footfall into lasting digital relationships rather than one-off transactions.

• The seven strategies surfaced in the PSFK retail graph share a single logic: participation over display. Proof zones, scarcity shocks, fan venues, and community programming all replace passive browsing with something people actively enter, remember, and return to.

• Physical presence is becoming a top-of-funnel asset. The smartest pop-up operators are measuring success in email captures, app installs, and retargeting reach, making experiential spend accountable in ways traditional retail never was.

I guess that maybe a decade ago pop-ups were treated as novelty retail or low-commitment real estate plays. What I’m seeing now is different…

… As I polish the contents of the next refresh of the PSFK Future of Retail graph there was one theme that seemed to keep, erm, popping-off.

What I noticed across retail, hospitality, sports, and culture, is that pop-ups have become precision engagement tools. They’re being used to prove performance, concentrate demand, activate fandom, test new behaviors, and convert physical presence into long-term relationships.

Based on patterns surfaced in PSFK’s graph (now available for your AI platform via Fodda), here are seven engagement strategies playing out through pop-ups and temporary physical experiences right now. - Piers

1. Proof Zones

Consumer trust has shifted from believing brand claims to experiencing the product themselves. Brands are now setting the stage for proof, not promises.

Product Trial “Proving Ground” Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are being designed to replicate real-world use conditions, allowing customers to validate performance in a single visit.

• Cuts skepticism

• Shortens decision cycles

• Turns experience into evidence

Learn more:

• Oysho’s –10°C ski-testing chamber in Madrid, Spain

• New Balance Tennis Clubhouse pop-up with live court play and coaching in London, UK.

2. Scarcity Shocks

Consumers live in a world of infinite choice, so brands are winning by shrinking the decision-making window.

Ticketed IP Collectible Pop-Ups

With this strategy, the pop-up itself becomes the scarcity mechanism. Tickets, timed access, and exclusive drops concentrate demand without discounting.

• Creates urgency without price erosion

• Turns retail into an event

• Feeds resale and collector culture

Learn more:

• Nintendo London pop-up with advance tickets and first-release merch

• Also in London: Studio Ghibli Knightsbridge pop-up with imported exclusives

Time-Boxed Venue Closures as Scarcity Marketing

One familiar but still effective ‘scarcity’ tactic we saw in the graph data: publishing the closing date as the headline.

Learn more:

• Framed as a finite cultural moment, Bar Far in Rome led their opening promotion by talking about their closing date

3. Fan Fun

Brands and retailers are looking to monetize shared moments, not just products.

Pop-Ups as Fandom Venues

Temporary spaces have become places to watch, gather, celebrate, and belong. Retail is bundled with viewing, merch, and participation.

• Converts solitary consumption into social energy

• Creates merch moments tied to memory

• Extends the cultural life of content

Learn more:

• Samsung reality-TV viewing pop-up bar in Stockholm

• Cash App × Sabrina Carpenter tour pop-up

@livsgourmandenÄntligen öppnar Sveriges första Reality-bar! 📺🥂 Visste du att Samsung öppnar pop-up baren "Verkligheten" på Nytorget? Från den 25 november kan du och kompisgänget kolla på allt från nya reality-snackisar till gamla favoriter på lokal! De visar Love Island, project runaway, the bachelor, Robinson, paradise hotell och förrädarna. 📍 Plats: Lykke, Nytorget (Södermalm) 🗓 När: Varje tisdag (25 nov – 16 dec) ⏰ Tid: 11:00 – 21:00 Här skapas den perfekta mötesplatsen för alla reality-älskare. #realitybar #stockholm @Samsung Nordics

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4. Familiar In The Unfamiliar

Consumers have always been looking for something new. With this ‘familair in the unfamiliar’ strategy, where something happens is the novelty, not just what happens.

Sports and Performance in Unexpected Venues

We saw in the PSFK Future of Retail graph how sport is being staged inside cultural, transit, and civic spaces rather than stadiums.

• Reaches non-traditional audiences

• Creates spectacle through contrast

• Makes participation feel accidental and discoverable

Examples

• Grand Sumo at the Royal Albert Hall

• Climbing competition inside a Paris RER station

5. Pop Of Funnel

Instead of thinking that stores are the end point, smart retailers and brands turn that thinking on its head and see how to leverage the store for the top of the funnel. They are looking to use Physical Moments to feed Digital Relationships

Pop-Ups as eCommerce Acquisition Channels

Pop-up experiences are designed for email capture, app installs, and retargeting rather than pure sales.

• Makes experiential spend measurable

• Bridges physical excitement with long-term engagement

• Extends ROI beyond footfall

Learn more:

• In Seoul, e-commerce platform SSG.com drove sign-ups and post-event engagement through their pop-up museum experience.

6. Get Well

With this approach, wellness is embedded into everyday formats rather than treated as a destination service. People don’t want appointments - they want low-friction entry points and will choose pop-ups and temporary zones to find ways to get well.

• Drop-in, social, repeatable

• Normalizes wellness behaviors

• Lowers the intimidation barrier

Learn more:

• adidas Hybrid Hotel in London combining recovery and product trial

• 1N Labs pop-up in Shoreditch, London

7. Participate Together

Ok, ok it’s not really just a pop-up strategy because we see this in both permanent and temporary spaces but the idea here is that retailers and brands can’t capture attention through nifty displays and smart merchandising anymore. Attention can be captured with the spirt of doing something together.

Community-Programmed Niche Retail Venues

In some stores, programming is the product. Workshops, personalization, tastings, and events are the reason to visit. The idea here is that sales follow participation.

• Feels local, human, repeatable

• Replaces paid social with calendar-driven engagement

• Creates reasons to return, not just browse

Learn more:

• Rebel Nell just opened its 4th store in Grand Rapids, MI and the “women-owned social enterprise: use in-store workshops and design bars as the main way to engage community

• Katie Loxton and Joma Jewellery’s ‘dual store’ embeds live personalization into retail moments in Milton Keynes, UK.

Final Takeaways

Hopefully these themes give you all at least something to pin a campaign to??

Across all of these examples, these themes play out:

• Participation over display.

• Proof over claims.

• Scarcity over scale.

• Shared moments over solitary consumption.

Pop-ups aren’t about being temporary anymore. They’re short, sharp interventions designed to do one thing very well: create belief, memory, and momentum.

FAQ

What has changed about how brands are using pop-up retail strategically? A decade ago pop-ups were low-commitment real estate plays or novelty formats. Today they function as precision engagement tools designed to do one specific thing well: build belief, create memory, or acquire a long-term digital relationship. The temporary format is now a feature, not a limitation.

How are brands using scarcity mechanics inside pop-up experiences? Ticketed access, timed entry, and exclusive product drops turn the pop-up itself into the scarcity mechanism, concentrating demand without discounting. Publishing a closing date as the opening headline is one of the simplest and most effective versions of this, framing the experience as a finite cultural moment rather than an open retail format.

Why are pop-ups increasingly being used as ecommerce acquisition channels? Physical experiences generate attention and emotional engagement that digital channels struggle to replicate. Forward-thinking retailers are designing pop-up visits around email capture, app installs, and retargeting sign-ups rather than immediate sales, extending the ROI of experiential spend well beyond the footfall of a single day.

What does community programming inside retail spaces actually look like in practice? Brands like Rebel Nell and Katie Loxton are replacing traditional merchandising with workshops, live personalization, and events as the primary reason to visit. The insight is that sales follow participation: when a store gives people something to do together, it creates reasons to return that no display or discount can replicate.

Turn Your AI into a Retail Trends Expert with Fodda

The pop-up strategies covered here are live inside the PSFK Future of Retail graph on Fodda, with case studies, brand examples, and trend clusters you can query directly inside your own AI. Stop pulling inspiration from scattered sources and give your AI a curated intelligence layer built specifically for retail.

Short, sharp, and built to create momentum. Just like the best pop-ups.

Explore the PSFK Retail Intelligence Hub on Fodda

• Quality is no longer something users produce. It is something systems care for. Across home and portable coffee, responsibility for the perfect cup is shifting from human skill to machine logic through recipe automation, embedded AI, and identity-triggered configuration.

• The interface is disappearing. Measurement, setup, and execution are moving into the background infrastructure of the device itself, with users shifting from hands-on control to outcome supervision as the new default interaction model.

• This is a preview, not a niche story. The system-level design shift playing out in coffee makers is likely to define how home appliances, consumer electronics, and connected devices evolve across the board over the next 18 to 24 months.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to find much when I started researching this topic. But I was very wrong. Once you start looking at how obsessive people are about the brew itself, it becomes obvious that the same intensity is now being applied to the machines that make it.

This newsletter should still be relevant even if you don’t work anywhere near coffee maker manufacturing. What’s happening here is a preview of how many other electronics and home appliances are likely to evolve over the next 18 to 24 months.

When I mapped the latest coffee maker innovation for Waldo, one pattern kept repeating. Quality is no longer something users produce. It’s something systems care for.

Across home and portable coffee, responsibility for the perfect cup is shifting from human skill to machine logic. Identity triggers configuration. Water chemistry adapts automatically. Recipe cards replace manual steps. Measurement fades into the background, and interfaces move from control to supervision.

Coffee makers are becoming machines that care.

Here are the key themes that emerged from the research.

MACRO THEME 1: Outcome-Managed Coffee Systems

Trend: Recipe-Controlled Automation

Across a growing set of new coffee machines, brewing is no longer executed as a manual process. Instead, extraction is handled as a stored recipe, with multiple variables coordinated automatically by the system. Grind size, temperature, flow, and timing are executed according to predefined logic rather than adjusted in real time by the user. In these systems, human skill is no longer the primary determinant of quality. Repeatability is achieved through software-driven control rather than technique. Examples: CoffeeTools’ XBloom Studio and De’Longhi Eletta Explore.

Trend: Prosumer Home Espresso

Several new home espresso machines now meet café-grade performance expectations, both technically and experientially. These products bring commercial-level thermal stability, pressure profiling, and consistency into domestic environments. Rather than relying on manual trial and error, digital profiling and saved settings allow users to achieve high-quality results without extensive training. Home espresso is no longer positioned as a simplified alternative to professional equipment, but as a capable system in its own right. Examples include: the SLAYER and the ROCKET R58 TUNE.

Trend: Managing Outcomes With AI

Coffee machines are increasingly designed to decide how to achieve a desired result rather than asking users to manage each step. Embedded sensing and AI-driven logic allow systems to adjust parameters internally, reducing the need for constant user input. As a result, interfaces shift away from hands-on control toward supervision and confirmation. The machine assumes responsibility for execution, while the user oversees outcomes rather than mechanics. Examples include the Bosch Personal AI Barista. Related in the kitchen appliance space - also check COZYTIME LUMO.

MACRO THEME 2: From User Setup to System Setup

Trend: Measurement With Modular, Screenless Nodes

Measurement is moving out of the foreground and into the system itself. Scales and sensors are increasingly designed to operate as background infrastructure, feeding data directly into connected machines or software layers. Instead of demanding attention through on-device screens, measurement data flows automatically into workflows where it can be acted on without interpretation. As automation increases, visible interfaces become less necessary. Examples include the Acaia Pyxis Black and the Mahlkönig Sync Scale.

Trend: Identity- & Tag-Driven Auto-Configuration

Home kitchen appliances are beginning to recognize users and inputs automatically, using identity signals such as tags, profiles, or consumable markers. Personalization loads instantly, without requiring manual setup or repeated configuration. Identity becomes a trigger for system behavior, allowing machines to adapt settings based on who is using them or what is being inserted. Configuration shifts from an explicit task to an implicit system function. Appliance examples include the Medi Water AI 2.0.

Trend: Smart Water Chemistry at Point of Pour

Water is increasingly treated as an adjustable ingredient rather than a fixed input. New systems actively modify pH, mineral balance, or additives at the point of use, adapting chemistry to specific beverages or recipes in real time. Filtration evolves beyond purification into active composition control, allowing water characteristics to be tuned as part of the brewing process rather than standardized in advance. Examples inlcude the Aquablu REFILL+ and the Kara Pod

MACRO THEME 3: Portability & Modularity

Trend: Peripheral Tools as Quality Multipliers

Instead of requiring full system upgrades, innovation is increasingly focused on addressing specific weak points in the brewing process. Peripheral tools intervene at precise moments, delivering measurable improvements in consistency or quality. These small, targeted devices act as multipliers rather than replacements, allowing users to enhance performance without replacing core equipment. Examples include Nucleus Coffee Tools Bloom and the Michael Harris Better Vessel.

Trend: Coffee Machines Go Mobile

Automation is no longer confined to the kitchen. Portable and compact coffee machines now bring controlled brewing into travel, work, and temporary environments. Increased mobility introduces greater variability in conditions, which in turn increases the importance of system-managed control. Even outside the home, expectations for quality and consistency remain high. Examples include the IKAPE KAPO K2 and the Ecoldbrew

Trend: Convenience Without the Pod-Waste Penalty

Convenience is being decoupled from disposability. New formats preserve the speed and ease associated with pods while reducing single-use waste through refillable, compostable, or hybrid solutions. These systems integrate sustainability into existing habits rather than asking users to change behavior. Pod formats evolve structurally, not experientially. Examples include the Pod Star Refillable Capsule.

Final Takeaways

The deeper shift is from feature upgrades to system-level design. From user setup to system setup. From interfaces that demand attention to infrastructure that disappears.

For product, retail, and innovation teams, the takeaway is simple. The premium is no longer control. It’s consistency. And the competitive advantage moves to whoever takes responsibility for outcomes, not just tools.

The full Coffee Maker Innovation report was prepared by me at PSFK and commissioned by Waldo, using Waldo’s trends system to surface the underlying mechanics driving these changes.

Thanks to the team at Waldo for making this report possible. A deck is available here.

FAQ

What is the core design shift happening in consumer coffee machines right now? The shift is from feature upgrades to system-level design. Variables like grind size, water chemistry, temperature, and timing are increasingly coordinated automatically by machine logic rather than managed manually by the user. Repeatability through software is replacing technique as the primary quality driver.

Why does the coffee maker category matter to product and innovation teams outside the category? Coffee makers are an early and concentrated example of a broader transition: from devices that give users control to systems that take responsibility for outcomes. The same logic is likely to play out in kitchen appliances, personal care devices, and home electronics as embedded sensing and AI become standard components rather than premium add-ons.

How is portability changing expectations around consistency in consumer electronics? As capable brewing systems move into travel and work environments, the variability of conditions increases but consumer expectations for quality do not drop. This is pushing portability and system-managed control to develop together rather than portability being treated as a simplified or degraded experience.

What does identity-triggered auto-configuration signal about where appliance design is headed? Appliances that recognize users through tags, profiles, or consumable markers and load personalized settings instantly represent a shift from configuration as an explicit task to configuration as an implicit system function. The interaction model moves from setup to supervision, which has significant implications for how brands think about onboarding, loyalty, and long-term product relationships.

Turn Your AI into a Consumer Electronics Trends Expert with Fodda

The system-level design shift documented here is one of dozens of emerging patterns tracked inside the PSFK trend graph on Fodda. Whether you are working in product development, retail strategy, or innovation research, giving your AI access to curated CE intelligence means you stop reacting to category shifts and start anticipating them.

The premium is no longer control. It is consistency. Get your AI consistent on the trends.

Explore the PSFK Consumer Electronics Intelligence Hub on Fodda

Over the past few months, we’ve been seeing a quiet shift in how agencies, consultancies and corporations think about insights in an AI-driven world. The conversation is moving away from dashboards and reports, and toward how AI systems themselves are fed with trusted, differentiated knowledge.

Alongside PSFK’s trends and innovation work, we’re currently concepting an early-stage project exploring this shift » effectively treating insights as a context layer that AI platforms can draw from, rather than something humans have to manually interpret and repackage each time. It’s still early, but the idea behind Fodda is simple: if AI is going to be used everywhere, the quality and structure of the knowledge behind it matters more than ever.

We’ll share more as this, kinda, expert ‘knowledge graph’ marketplace develops, but for now consider this a heads up that how insights are gathered, structured, and used by AI systems is entering a period of rapid change.

2. What we’re writing: AI, knowledge graphs, and the future of reasoning

• Why I’m definitely not building another AI platform again

• Why my AI strategies will use Knowledge Graphs in 2026

• Bias is unavoidable with AI and that’s a Good Thing

• Why “Graphs” x 4

3. CES takeaways

• The audacity of the Chinese brand

• Deepdive: L’Oréal at CES 2026

• Beauty Tech at CES 2026

• Could automotive innovation drive the next wave of wearable tech?

• CES 2027 Booth Idea: Beds

• Care is no longer somewhere you go. It is a mesh running through homes, workplaces, devices, and communities. The hospital is becoming one node in a distributed system, with intelligence shifting outward to patients, AI layers, and specialist networks simultaneously.

• The most significant AI in healthcare right now is invisible. Ambient listening tools and documentation copilots sitting inside clinical workflows are reclaiming clinician time at scale, and the brands winning this narrative are framing AI as quiet relief rather than replacement.

• Data governance is becoming a care feature, not a compliance footnote. As continuous data flows out of wearables, at-home diagnostics, and telehealth platforms, patient-controlled data architecture is emerging as a core part of the value proposition rather than a back-end consideration.

This week, I’m sharing some thought leadership work I did with a client. As some of you may remember, I built a trends graph for the Waldo team over the summer and over the last couple of months I’ve been using it to generate various research reports - including the To Be In 2026 report and this super fun piece on socializing and ‘Going Out’ trends.

The Waldo graph and the other PSFK graphs I’m building for my new project Fodda are based on a system that monitors week signals daily and then conducts pattern recongition across the data set once a month. I love how this tech allows multi-language, multi-region work - and I believe this global data delivery helps the graph users develop richer insights.

This week, I want to share the research the system helped me generate around health. We look at the healthcare continuum and how and where brands can play along it.

Health In Motion

Care used to be somewhere you went. A clinic, a waiting room, a ward with fluorescent strip lighting and daytime TV. Today it is turning into a mesh that runs through homes, workplaces, communities, devices and apps. Intelligence is shifting outward as well, from the hospital core to patients, AI systems and specialist networks.

In this newsletter we pull that shift into five big themes that show where health is actually happening in 2026, and where brands, agencies and platforms can credibly play along the new continuum.

1. Care Moves Home And Into Everyday Life

Across categories, care is leaking out of hospitals and clinics and into kitchens, bedrooms, driveways and neighborhood hubs. Hospital at home models let patients receive acute level care without ever stepping into a ward, combining in person visits, telehealth and remote monitoring.

You can see this in systems building full scale hospital at home programs and home hospital services, as well as new mobile acute care teams that turn bloodwork and diagnostics into a five minute errand rather than a half day trip. At the same time, consumer health is filling in with at home testing, smart rings and ear worn sensors that run vitals in the background.

What this means for brands

• Map the home first journey around your product or service, from first symptom to kit on the counter to follow up and ongoing monitoring.

• Prototype services that wrap around diagnostics, such as coaching, reminders and community clinic partnerships.

• Treat community clinics, mobile units and neighborhood hubs as design partners, not just media channels.

2. Women’s Health Becomes An Orchestrated System

Women’s health has long been fragmented across specialties and life stages. Now it is being rebuilt as a connected system that runs from first period to post menopause. Virtual platforms like Maven Clinic position themselves as comprehensive women’s and family health across every life stage, while hybrid providers like Tia bundle primary care, gynecology, mental health and acupuncture under one roof.

On the ground, health systems are opening integrated centers like Mount Sinai’s Carolyn Rowan Center for Women’s Health and Wellness and Columbia’s Integrated Women’s Health Program which unite menopause, cardiology, mental health and more around one coordinated experience.

What this means for brands

• Pitch life stage platforms instead of single indication campaigns, with continuity across fertility, pregnancy, menopause and beyond.

• Design glue content that connects OB GYN, primary care, cardiology and mental health around shared risk stories and referral paths.

• Build employer and payer facing narratives that tie better women’s journeys to measurable business outcomes.

3. AI Becomes The Invisible Operating System Of Care

The most interesting AI in health right now is not a chat bot on a website. It sits in the plumbing. Health systems are rolling out ambient listening tools and documentation copilots that sit in the exam room, listen to the visit and write the note so clinicians can look at patients instead of screens.

Vendors like Abridge are being deployed across large systems including Johns Hopkins, Kaiser and Mayo to automate clinical documentation. Cleveland Clinic is using ambient listening software to reduce typing time for more than 4,000 physicians, while Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot pushes the same idea directly inside the EHR. Other tools like DAX Copilot and Tampa General’s AI powered ambient documentation target nursing workflows, where documentation burden is just as heavy.

What this means for brands

• Narrate AI as quiet relief rather than replacement, and tie stories directly to reclaimed clinician time and reduced burnout.

• Build simple internal guardrails for what counts as a credible AI claim so marketing does not outrun evidence.

• Surface operational wins inside clinical storytelling, for example more bedside time or faster discharge, not only model accuracy.

4. Mental Health Everywhere, Not Just In The Clinic

Mental health has escaped the therapist’s office and single app icon. It shows up in workplaces, education, disease programs and always on peer networks. National platforms like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and Crisis Text Line provide 24/7 access to human counselors through calls, text and chat, while agencies like SAMHSA push behavioral health into community programs and public campaigns.

These networks are being complemented by identity specific and situation specific support, from LGBTQ+ youth services to back to school mental health kits promoted through Crisis Text Line’s education resources. At the same time, AI is being woven into triage and routing, although recent investigations show many tools still struggle with something as basic as surfacing the right hotline number for someone in crisis. That gap is pushing regulators and advocates to demand more location aware, culturally competent support.

What this means for brands

• Treat mental health as a default layer in health and life stage programs, not a side campaign.

• Partner with established crisis and peer networks instead of building yet another standalone app.

• For employer and payer facing work, package mental health screening, manager training and navigation alongside disease education.

5. Patient Controlled Data And Trust As Infrastructure

As continuous data flows out of wearables, at home diagnostics, telehealth and AI systems, the key question is who controls it. A new wave of platforms is trying to put patients, and sometimes their families, in charge. Apps like Vaultt position themselves as secure health information organizers that people own and control. Others, such as HealthVault / Cloud for Care and Patient Data Vault, build patient owned records and trial matching layers on top of structured data vaults.

The common thread is an architecture where individuals can see, manage and selectively share their records instead of leaving everything inside opaque hospital or tech platforms. These systems are emerging alongside new regulations and professional debates about how to use generative AI safely on health data, and how to keep sensitive information encrypted at rest and in motion.

What this means for brands

• Make the data offer explicit in every digital concept. Spell out what people get back, how long information is kept and how consent can be revoked.

• Turn privacy into part of the value proposition, with clear language about encryption, storage and sharing.

• Design consent flows that are easy to revisit, not one time checkbox moments.

Final Takeaways

Across all five shifts, health is turning into an everywhere, all the time layer that surrounds people as they move through daily life. Homes, workplaces, communities and devices are becoming extensions of the health system. AI runs in the background as an invisible colleague. Women’s health and mental health are being rebuilt as longitudinal programs. Data governance is becoming part of the care experience itself.

For brands and agencies, the opportunity is not to bolt health themed campaigns onto old models. It is to work out where you can credibly plug into this new continuum, whether that means designing home first service journeys, orchestrating life stage ecosystems, building narratives that make background AI feel trustworthy, or treating privacy and control as core product features.

FAQ

What is driving the shift from clinic-based care to distributed, home-first health models? A combination of remote monitoring technology, telehealth infrastructure, and at-home diagnostic tools has made it commercially and clinically viable to deliver acute-level care outside hospital walls. The result is a health continuum that runs through kitchens, bedrooms, and neighborhood hubs rather than concentrating in centralized facilities.

How are brands expected to show up differently along the new healthcare continuum? The opportunity is not to add health-themed campaigns onto existing models but to identify credible points of entry into the new system: designing home-first service journeys, orchestrating life-stage ecosystems, or building narratives that make background AI feel trustworthy. Single-indication campaigns are giving way to longitudinal platform thinking.

Why is women’s health emerging as a distinct strategic priority for brands and platforms? Women’s health has historically been fragmented across specialties and life stages with little connective tissue between them. Platforms like Maven Clinic and hybrid providers like Tia are rebuilding it as a coordinated system spanning fertility, pregnancy, menopause, and mental health, creating new brand opportunities around continuity rather than condition-specific moments.

What does patient-controlled data architecture mean for brands building digital health products? As wearables, diagnostics, and AI systems generate continuous personal health data, consumers and regulators are demanding clarity on who owns it. Brands that make the data offer explicit, with clear language around encryption, consent, and revocation, are turning privacy into a competitive differentiator rather than treating it as a legal requirement.

Turn Your AI into a Health & Wellness Trends Expert with Fodda

The five shifts covered here are live signals inside the PSFK trend graph on Fodda, where curated expert sources track how care is being redesigned across homes, devices, workplaces, and communities. Give your AI the intelligence layer it needs to identify where your brand can credibly plug into the new health continuum.

Care is everywhere now. Your AI should be too.

Explore the PSFK Intelligence Hub on Fodda

• The toy market has a secret adult problem. Kidult collectors, nostalgia-driven blind box drops, and thousand-dollar Lego sets are redefining play as a lifestyle category with rarity tiers, resale value, and luxury collectible logic built in from the start.

• IP is becoming location strategy. Branded cafes, experiential playgrounds, and fan venues are turning game and toy franchises into places people inhabit rather than products they consume, with booking, loyalty, and UGC capture built into the physical experience.

• Screen-lite is a design principle, not a feature. The fastest-growing segment of educational play keeps the object tactile and simple in a child’s hand while pushing complexity into a parent app layer, with a market projected to nearly double to $118 billion by 2030.

On a recent networking call someone asked me where to find good reports on millennial trends. They were frustrated. In their words, Gen Z has “eaten all the oxygen in the room” when it comes to research and insight. When I checked the PSFK Trend Graph for millennial data, most of what surfaced lumped millennials and Gen Z together into one big “under 45” bucket. Useful for media planning, not so helpful if you are trying to understand a specific generation that is now paying mortgages and buying orthodontics.

I found myself suggesting that if you really want to track millennials, you probably have to follow what shows up as they age. Fitness and weight loss regimes. Hobbies that drift from casual to obsessive. The way collectibles, games and toys keep getting pulled back into their lives. Sometimes under the banner of parenting. Sometimes not.

Which brings us, slightly sideways, to toys and games. This newsletter looks at how play is evolving across kidult collectibles, experiential playgrounds, screen lite storytelling, virtual pets and gamified fitness, and what that tells us about the audiences behind the trends. It is not a millennial report, but if you read between the lines you will see plenty about the people who grew up with Tamagotchi and PlayStation and are now buying Death Star sets, blind box toys and family passes to Lego parks.

Ok, this is probably not the neatest way to start a newsletter about toys and games. Still, what follows is for your professional perusal only, ok?

- Piers, PSFK

Comment on this newsletter on the LinkedIn version of the trends report.

A. Franchises, Fandom and Collectibles

1. Kidult Collectibles and Blind Box Fandom

Adult collectors are driving a premium layer of the toy market, where figures, sets and mystery drops function as lifestyle objects rather than just kids’ playthings.

• When palm sized Labubu blind box figures sold out online at around 11 dollars each, Pop Mart’s profits jumped nearly 400 percent. Their CEO is targeting 20 billion yuan in revenue by 2025 and planning 10 new US stores, all off the back of collectible toy demand.

• Lego has launched a 9,023 piece Death Star set at a $1,000 price point, clearly aimed at serious adult hobbyists. Lego reported a 10 percent increase in net profit and a 12 percent rise in sales, launching a record 314 new sets in the first half of 2025, plus 24 new stores, many of which also serve adult fans.

• Specialty resale shops like Bricks and Minifigs in Maryland focus on buying, trading and reselling new and used Lego sets for collectors, not just kids and parents who want a single box on a birthday.

• Atari CX-10 joystick whiskey decanter set sells at $125 for nostalgic adult gamers.

• Taras Yoom launched “Another Kingdom” backgammon set as a 21-edition art object with NFC authentication – a tabletop game as luxury collectible.

How To Leverage This Trend

• Treat toys as long term collectible systems with rarity tiers, artist collaborations and resellable value.

• Design “Tier 2” and “Tier 3” experiences such as repair, trade and display services around core lines.

• Use blind boxes and limited drops carefully to balance excitement with fatigue and regulator interest.

2. Franchises as Play Platforms

Game and toy IP are being treated as platforms rather than single products, with user created content, education and cross media storytelling all orbiting the same world.

• In Korea, Nexon is turning MapleStory into a multi platform ecosystem. There is a UGC sandbox for player built games and “Hello Maple” for coding education using the same IP, both showing high engagement and strong earnings.

• SMG Studio and Lego have launched Lego Party, a multiplayer game with more than 60 minigames themed around Lego sets and deep character customisation. Pre orders include exclusive digital minifigures that link game to physical collection habits.

• Disney Jr is extending Marvel into preschool through Marvel’s Iron Man and His Awesome Friends, designed to work for both kids and parents by focusing on resilience and problem solving as much as heroics. (yeah, sure….)

• Lego’s “Never Stop Playing” campaign with Tom Holland uses a short film and subsequent exhibition at Lego House in Denmark to turn the brand’s core idea of creativity into a cultural event.

• Purina Beggin’ Blocks Minecraft treats + sweepstakes: use of Minecraft IP bridging film, food and gaming prizes.

How To Leverage This Trend

• Design IP with a clear spine that can support games, toys, shows, creator tools and education products.

• Allow kids and fans to build inside the world, then promote and merchandise the best community work.

• Use education and skills building as a legitimate on ramp into a franchise, not an afterthought.

B. Immersive Worlds, Events and Venues

3. ‘Eventized’ Launches and Live Service Seasons

Major releases now behave like serialized media, with pre testing, cross title rewards and live events that turn launches into multi week narratives.

Why now

• EA is reshaping Battlefield into something closer to an annualized franchise, consolidating several studios into Battlefield Studios and creating Battlefield Labs for early player testing before fiscal 2026 launch.

• The Road to Battlefield 6 event in Battlefield 2042 ran from August 10 to October 7 and offered more than 20 exclusive rewards for Battlefield 6 and over 50 for Battlefield 2042, clearly linking the outgoing game to the new one.

• The launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong caused store access issues on Steam, Nintendo eShop and Xbox due to mega-demand, with players joking that store errors were the first boss of the game. That level of heat explains why publishers now design launch as a season instead of a single moment.

How To Leverage This Trend

• Build a pre launch runway that includes tests, creator access and “legacy” events inside older titles.

• Design reward paths that bridge older and newer titles and keep status carrying forward.

• Treat launch weeks like live TV premieres, with planned beats, community memes and contingency plans for infrastructure strain.

4. Experiential Playgrounds and Branded Venues

Toys and games increasingly show up as physical destinations where fans can buy, play, eat and post, not just as products on shelves.

Why now

• The Pokémon Company ran a dedicated Pokémon Center pop up at the 2025 Pokémon World Championships in Anaheim, offering exclusive event merchandise and turning competition viewing into a shopping and fandom moment.

• Shanghai Lego Land keeps selling out tickets and hotel stays driven by local families and strategic adult ticket discounts.

• Xbox France opened the Radianite Café in Paris during Valorant Champions finals.

• The Jellycat Café in Shanghai reopens as a hybrid café and brand storytelling space where plush toys become pastries, designed for social shareability and nostalgia powered engagement.

• Draftcade in Omaha offers more than 75 classic arcade games plus 48 draft beers, using a 10 dollar wristband model for unlimited play and expanding an existing arcade bar chain.

• Victory Escape Game in Paris adds new escape rooms, from a haunted 1950s motel to family focused adventure in a lost ark setting, framing puzzle rooms as repeatable social nights out.

• Pickleball concepts like The Pickle Pad and Chicken N Pickle are treated as full entertainment hubs that combine courts, dining, community events and even travel experiences, not just sports facilities (334906).

How To Leverage This Trend

• Think about IP as a location strategy: cafés, arcades, parks and pop ups where fans can live inside the world for an afternoon.

• Use time limited formats and exclusive merch to create urgency and social proof.

• Integrate booking, loyalty and UGC capture so these spaces feed ongoing digital play and CRM, not just footfall.

C. Screen-lite and Companions

5. Screen-lite Storytelling and Calm Tech Play

Screen-free and screen-lite devices use simple physical inputs and audio to deliver stories, music and educational content, giving kids an object to handle and parents a way to manage content and limits without handing over a full screen.

• Toniebox is positioned as a screen-free audio player that uses collectible figurines to trigger stories and music, connected to a Tonies app that lets parents manage content and controls.

• Yoto Player is a screen-free audio device that plays content via physical cards, with a companion app for parents to manage playlists and daily usage limits.

• A Stylus round-up spotlights three tech free or screen free tools: MyWonder, a powered learning companion in India activated by mode cards, Nodi Flip, an audio device for 5 to 12 year olds that plays Spotify, podcasts and curated lessons, and TeenieWins, a talking flash card reader developed with therapists for neurodivergent kids and speech therapy. All are framed as screen free educational tech for kids (Article 30410836).

• The educational toys market was estimated at $54.00 billion USD in 2023 and is projected to reach $118.79 billion USD by 2030, which gives a strong macro tailwind for screen-lite learning devices that sit between toys and edtech.

How To Leverage This Trend

• Treat screen-lite as a design principle, not just a feature. Keep the object tactile and simple in the child’s hand and push most complexity into a parent app or cloud layer.

• Build collectible or modular ecosystems around the core device: figurines, cards, tiles or flash cards that can be sold in waves and mapped to themes such as bedtime, travel, language or STEM.

• Use screen-lite devices as gateways to broader franchises. Stories, songs and missions on the box or player can introduce IP that later shows up in books, shows, games or classroom materials.

• Explore inclusive and therapeutic use cases. TeenieWins is already being piloted with neurodivergent kids and speech therapy, which hints at a wider role for audio and card based systems in care and special education.

6. Virtual Pets and Companion Devices

Virtual companions are returning in updated forms that blend nostalgia with more complex play and closer daily presence.

• Takara Tomy and The Pokémon Company are launching the Pokémon Poke Monster Ball, an interactive virtual pet device shaped like a Pokéball that lets users care for 157 virtual Pokémon and includes a diary feature to save memories, priced at 7,480 yen.

  • It’s argued that the device is a Tamagotchi style virtual pet, using both care loops and battle play, which brings 1990s mechanics into a modern, IP rich context./

• Huawei’s Children’s Watch 3 Pro adds a camera, 4G and location tracking into a child focused wearable, turning the watch into a daily companion device that is as much about communication and peace of mind as it is about play.

• OpenSea “Meetbit” is an AI plush tied to Meebits collectibles: a literal AI toy + blockchain identity.

• Mr. Christmas AI Santa telephone toy with conversational AI, memory and upsellable minutes.

What next

• Use emotional bonds and low friction check ins as the core loop instead of pure high intensity gameplay.

• Combine physical shells with software updates so that virtual pets can evolve with seasonal content and events.

• Explore companion devices that help kids manage routines, safety and self expression, not just entertainment.

D. Play for Health and Growth

8. Learning First Edutainment and Educational Play

There is a steady stream of toys, platforms and content where learning is the main promise, but play and story are the delivery mechanism.

• VTech’s Professor Schreibfix is an educational toy designed to teach reading and writing with a blackboard, pencil, illuminated screen and audio feedback, positioned explicitly as an interactive learning aid rather than a pure toy.

• A cluster of edtech startups is building education through playful interfaces. Edurino offers educational games, Faba develops audio devices for children, and several others in literacy and math have all raised significant rounds, according to a roundup of new tools for literacy, math and teacher connections (995821).

• Coding platform Codedéx leans on game development courses and “challenge packs” to make programming feel like a series of adventures rather than dry instruction .

• GraphoGame data-driven literacy game with real-time teacher analytics.

• AchieveAble provides blended 1:1 + game-show math tutoring.

How To Leverage This Trend

• Pair physical toys with simple companion apps or portals that give parents and teachers real feedback on progress.

• Use familiar game genres such as puzzles, narrative quests and mini challenges to deliver core curriculum skills.

• Position learning toys as long term systems that can be upgraded through new content drops and modules, not as one off purchases.

Ok - I dropped the fitness and gaming trend and the one about hardcore (or gamecore?) peripheral set up. This newsletter was going on too long. But again, can you guess which midriff-widening generation wants to gamify their exercise??

FAQ

What is driving adult collectors back into the toy and games market? A generation that grew up with Tamagotchi, PlayStation, and early Lego is now returning to play through premium collectibles, blind box drops, and nostalgia-anchored IP with resale value built in. The commercial signal is hard to ignore: Pop Mart profits jumped nearly 400 percent on the back of palm-sized blind box figures selling out at around eleven dollars each.

How are toy and game brands using physical venues as strategic brand assets? Experiences like the Jellycat Café in Shanghai, the Xbox Radianite Café in Paris, and Pokémon Center pop-ups at championship events are turning IP into destinations where fans can buy, play, eat, and post. The venue becomes a fandom amplifier rather than a retail outpost, with social shareability and exclusive merchandise doing the acquisition work.

What does the screen-lite trend tell us about where educational play is headed? Parents are increasingly choosing devices that give children a physical object to handle while keeping content management and usage limits inside a companion app. The design principle is tactile simplicity in the child’s hand and sophisticated control in the parent layer, with collectible ecosystems of cards, figurines, and tiles sold in waves around the core device.

Why are franchises being treated as platforms rather than single products? The most durable toy and game IP now supports user-generated content, education products, cross-media storytelling, and live service seasons from a single spine. Lego’s ecosystem across retail, digital games, theme parks, and fan communities is the clearest example of IP that compounds in value precisely because it lets people build inside the world rather than just consume it.

Turn Your AI into a Retail & Culture Trends Expert with Fodda

The play economy is one of the clearest windows into how consumer behavior, nostalgia, community, and commerce are converging in real time. Fodda gives your AI direct access to the PSFK trend graph so you can query the signals, case studies, and brand patterns driving the next generation of experiential and collectible retail.

Serious play requires serious intelligence.

Explore the PSFK Retail Intelligence Hub on Fodda

(All images AI generated)

• The most durable brand strategies for 2026 are structural, not campaign-shaped. Rituals, collectibles, restoration, and accountability are not creative executions to bolt onto a media plan. They are operating models that build loyalty through repeated participation rather than repeated exposure.

• Sustainability has crossed a threshold from promise to proof. Consumers and the signal data inside the Trends Graph are both pointing the same direction: corporate reporting is losing credibility and outcome-linked accountability, tied to real donations, local causes, and measurable restoration, is replacing it.

• 2026 is the year AI goes from model to agent, and agents need data. The shift from large pre-trained models to lighter, context-aware agents that access domain knowledge on demand is the infrastructure story underneath every brand activation strategy on this list.

How could the brand you work with connect more deeply with its audience in 2026?

In this email, I outline 10 ideas for what your organization can be next year.

To build them, I used a Trends Graph I created over the summer for Waldo’s AI insights engine. It captured hundreds of emergent signals across dozens of industries and audience groups. The graph is built on two decades of pattern recognition experience at PSFK, and so by applying that lens to the latest data, I surfaced the following ten activation strategies that feel relevant to almost any modern brand.

- Piers, PSFK

(If you want the deeper dive, you can read the full report, view the summary deck, or watch the webinar from last week)

1. Be A Ritual

To start, let’s look at this idea around helping people enjoy the small moments people repeat at daily or regular intervals. Across the Trends Graph, I saw brands elevating everyday actions into ceremonies - morning sets at Ryze, Chick-fil-A’s Day Bright Café, and a ‘At Home’ OOH campaign by Dunkin that aims to evoke home-centric rituals.

As retail innovation expert Michael Abata noted during last week’s webinar: “There’s real growth in these small, repeatable moments. This is where loyalty is built.”

The opportunity for brands in 2026: Don’t make campaigns; make repeatable brand touchpoints people want to return to.

2. Be A Revival

Heritage has power, but only when it’s reinterpreted for new audiences. The revival signals we tracked weren’t nostalgic throwbacks—they were recombinations: Volkswagen bringing Polo and GTI into the EV era, Paris bakeries resurrecting retro desserts with contemporary flavor logic.

As Mike Peck of Brooks Running put it when I spoke to him: “Revival isn’t pulling something from the vault. It’s bringing heritage forward with the people and technology shaping what’s next.”

For many brands, revival isn’t just cultural strategy—it’s accessibility strategy. Remixing the past opens the door to audiences who may never have seen themselves in the original.

3. Be Collectible

Collectibles have long been a way for people to express identity, join communities, and take part in cultural stories. Brands have been part of this fan culture and today, there’s an opportunity for connect by designing brand tokens of belonging. Across the data collected in the trends graph I saw brands using collectible formats to create access points into their worlds—from Swarovski x Minecraft to Kith x Nanzuka to hyper-creative K-pop Demon Hunter packaging.

Brand innovation expert Val Vacante said it best on the webinar: “The magic isn’t in the item. It’s in the moment, the memory, and the community that rallies around it.”

2026 advice: Treat collectibles not as merch but as cultural connectors.

4. Be Regenerative

Next year think about how your brand can give back more than it takes. Regeneration goes beyond reducing harm. It’s about designing products, systems, and supply chains that return value to people and the planet. The Trends Graph surfaced fashion partnerships like Under Armour x UNLESS creating plant-based performance wear, beauty brands such as McHan Organics turning cocoa waste into high-value skincare, and travel operators like Red Sea Global designing hospitality as ecosystem restoration.

For 2026: People want to see what your brand gives back, not the footprint it leaves behind.

5. Be Restorative

How can you brand help people tune back in and feel ready for what’s to come in 2026? People are choosing experiences that help them recover and feel restored. Robotic massage pods, red-light therapy booths, and recovery-first footwear are showing up in gyms, shops, workplaces, and travel hubs, turning everyday touchpoints into small restorative resets

As Donna Dei-Baning from the Martin Agency told our audience last week: “The most relevant brands will be the ones that help people feel restored. Brands that can actually calm the noise.”

Your 2026 challenge: Build restoration into your experience—products and moments that reduce friction, lower stress, and help people feel steady again.

6. Be Accountable

When it comes to an organization’s approach to sustainability, consumers want outcomes, not promises. In the data held within the Waldo trends graph, I could see a sentimental shift against corporate reporting and towards proof. CAVA tying openings to food-bank donations, PureGym connecting workouts to hyper-local causes.

As marketing expert and Substack-newsletter author told me last week: “The future belongs to brands that create profit and positive impact at the same time.”

In 2026, channel your brand’s sustainability strategy towards being accountable.

7. Be A Guardian

Wearables and IoT are re-emerging—not as gadgets, but as ambient layers of protection for the home, body, and journey. The strongest examples weren’t intrusive; they were subtle. Air quality monitors that disappear into furniture, mobility features like Heineken’s distraction-reducing mobile service in Finland, stress-detecting rings and silent sensors feeding coaching systems.

Giuseppe also noted: “Tech will become far more present but far less visible.”

Brands can take the same path: intelligence that reassures without overwhelming.

8. Be Driven

Vehicles are becoming adaptive environments—entertainment hubs, wellness pods, creative offices, and commerce portals. Huawei’s M9 is a preview of cabins that update constantly, read context, and shift modes based on need. Or take a look at Sharp’s concept car/living room.

Cars aren’t products anymore; they’re platforms. The brand opportunity lies in the layers built around movement: content, service, loyalty, identity.

9. Be In Sync

2026’s best brand experiences will move fluidly—across channels, across mediums, and across time. Brands need to design for continuity and make sure they don’t separate the physical and digital consumer experience.

Examples in my research included Netflix House blending streaming worlds with physical play. Or in China drivers of new XPeng cars can launch emoji bombs visible only through the car’s AR windshield display(!)

People want moments that travel with them. An opportunity for the brand is to keep the story coherent as it jumps screens, spaces, and situations.

10. Be On The Fly

2025 was the year of agentic AI. 2026 becomes the year of AI data.

Brands will shift from using oversized, pre-trained models to employing lighter and more nimble agents that adapt in real time: models that learn what they need, when they need it, by accessing the right data at the moment of action.

That requires something simple but not yet common: fluid, on-demand access to trustworthy domain knowledge. This is where I see the future heading - and why I’ve been developing Fodda (ah-ha!): a marketplace for AI-ready knowledge graphs that plug directly into these emerging agent systems.

2026 priority: Equip your AI stack with differentiated, business-specific data. Think of it as the intelligence layer your agents will need in order to act with context. DM me on LinkedIn if you want to know more about this and Fodda.

FAQ

Why are repeatable rituals becoming a more valuable brand asset than campaign moments? Loyalty is built in the small, repeated moments people return to by choice rather than in the large moments brands manufacture for attention. The Trends Graph surfaced brands like Ryze and Dunkin building around morning rituals and home-centric touchpoints precisely because those formats create habitual return rather than one-time engagement.

What is the difference between a brand revival and nostalgia marketing? A revival brings heritage forward through the people, technology, and cultural context of the present rather than simply restoring something from the archive. The most effective examples in the research, from Volkswagen’s EV reinterpretation of the GTI to Paris bakeries recombining retro desserts with contemporary flavor logic, use the past as raw material rather than as the destination.

How are brands operationalizing accountability beyond sustainability reporting? The shift is from disclosed intentions to visible outcomes. Brands like CAVA tying new store openings directly to food-bank donations and PureGym connecting workout activity to hyper-local causes are building accountability into the business model itself rather than into the communications layer that sits on top of it.

What does the shift toward agentic AI mean for how brands should think about their data infrastructure? As AI moves from large pre-trained models toward lighter agents that access domain knowledge on demand at the moment of action, the competitive advantage shifts to whoever has the most trustworthy, business-specific data available for those agents to draw on. Generic model outputs will flatten. Differentiated knowledge graphs will be the intelligence layer that separates one brand’s AI capability from another’s.

Turn Your AI into a Brand Strategy Expert with Fodda

The ten strategies in this piece were surfaced from hundreds of signals inside a Trends Graph built on two decades of PSFK pattern recognition. Fodda makes that kind of curated domain intelligence available directly inside your AI, giving your agents the context they need to act with precision rather than generality.

2026 belongs to brands with better data underneath them. Start building that layer now.

Explore the PSFK Intelligence Hub on Fodda