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]

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.

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.

About PSFK

PSFK is a globally recognized trends and innovation research organization led by Piers Fawkes. For over two decades, PSFK has tracked cultural and commercial change across industries. Each trend is identified, validated, and named by PSFK researchers through structured signal tracking, grounded theory analysis, and expert editorial judgment.

Learn more: psfk.com · Explore PSFK trend graphs and API access: fodda.ai

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).

About PSFK

PSFK is a globally recognized trends and innovation research organization led by Piers Fawkes. For over two decades, PSFK has tracked cultural and commercial change across industries. Each trend is identified, validated, and named by PSFK researchers through structured signal tracking, grounded theory analysis, and expert editorial judgment.

Learn more: https://www.psfk.com

Explore PSFK trend graphs and API access: https://www.fodda.ai

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:

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.

If you’d like to deep dive into an element of this research or receive a presentation, contact PSFK.

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

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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.

—

The themes, trends, and patterns in this report were surfaced using PSFK’s Future of Retail graph. Use our knowledge graphs to nourish your AI platform.

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.

Piers
Founder, PSFK

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

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.

A full copy of the report is available via the Waldo contact at the end of the newsletter. To discuss the contents of this newsletter, leave a comment on the LinkedIn duplicate of it here.

- piers@psfk.com

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.

To receive a deeper dive of this report, contact Waldo’s Nate Bandler for a copy - nate@waldo.fyi. To discuss the contents of this newsletter, leave a comment on the LinkedIn duplicate of it here.

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??

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

(All images AI generated)

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.

*****
If you want the deeper dive, you can read the full report, view the summary deck, or watch the webinar from last week. If you’d like me to present the trends I’m tracking — on a call or in person — drop me a line at hello@psfk.com.

That study became a benchmark. It changed how B2B brands published thought leadership, how we ran our research practice, and how the tech industry thought about human–machine connection. Looking back, the energy around wearables in 2014 feels similar to today’s AI rush — a mix of experimentation, optimism, and belief that a new interface would change everything.

For this newsletter, instead of a human research team (which have long flown the nest), I used the AI-powered PSFK Graph to analyze how those early ideas compare with the trends surfacing today - and to see what’s evolved, what’s persisted, and where things might go in another 10 years.

Let’s look at wearable trends today…

BUT FIRST: A REMINDER - COME JOIN ME & EXPERTS AS WE PRESENT 2026 BIG IDEAS TOMORROW ON LINKEDIN AT 12.30PM ET - RSVP HERE

1. BODY DATA + CONTINUOUS INSIGHT

Smart Rings Diversify into Metabolic Insight and On-Device AI Input

Smart rings now drive roughly 75% of global fitness-tracker revenue and whether they are carbon, ceramic or metallic, these rings are morphing into multimodal health and interaction hubs that sense, coach, and communicate.

As sensors shrink and on-device AI grows, the ring is emerging as the an interactive wearable — a subtle hub for metabolic and emotional awareness. Rings to track:

• Sandbar Stream Ring records whispered voice notes and replies in your own AI voice.

• VisRing adds a wraparound OLED display for gesture control.

• Ultrahuman Ring AIR® links HRV, sleep, and glucose into a unified metabolic stack used by pro cyclists.

• Reebok Smart Ring merges jewelry design with medical-grade sensors.

Then → Now: In 2014, wearables like the Nymi heartbeat band and Oxitone Watch focused on identity and early health alerts. A decade later, those functions converge inside the ring: authentication, metabolic sensing, and emotional feedback in a single interface. The quantified self has become the responsive self—AI now interprets the data it once merely displayed.

Continuous Biomarker Wearables Expand into Coaching and Clinical Workflows

Wearable sensing is moving from wellness to healthcare infrastructure. The digital-biomarker market ($5B → $18.8B by 2030) shows that real-time, contextual health tracking is becoming a permanent layer of care. Biomarker to stick close to:

• ECG247 provides certified real-time cardiac monitoring.

• Nix Biosensors tracks sweat chemistry to guide hydration for athletes and field workers.

• BioSens8 engineers microbe-based biosensors for non-invasive continuous tracking.

• MIT ultrasound patch enables at-home breast-cancer screening.

• Elkem SILBIONE™ LSR Select EC 70 introduces conductive, biocompatible silicone that makes next-gen sensors more durable and comfortable.

Then → Now: Where Data-Streamed Care once transmitted raw vitals (Pixie Diaper) today’s devices close the loop with insight and regulation. The sensor network has matured from an external monitor into a continuous diagnostic companion, fulfilling the prevention and precision-medicine vision forecast in 2014.

2. COGNITIVE & NEUROLOGICAL WEARABLES

Closed-Loop Neurotech for Sleep and Stress

EEG and biofeedback devices are moving from tracking to active modulation. As the EEG-headband market heads toward $1.5B by 2025, neurotech is becoming a daily self-regulation tool for sleep, focus, and stress. Front-of-mind examples in the PSFK Trend Graph:

• Muse and BrainBit blend EEG and motion sensing for adaptive mindfulness.

• BrainBit Callibri Sensors + NeuroFit PRO extend biofeedback to muscles and breathing for posture-based stress reduction.

• Neurovalens develops FDA-cleared neurostimulation for insomnia and anxiety.

• Elemind triggers deep sleep through acoustic stimulation.

• Neurable MW75 Neuro LT folds brain-monitoring into premium headphones — a hint at how cognitive tech may merge with mainstream audio.

Then → Now: The early wearables detailed in the report’s Emotional Mirror section visualized mood with LEDs; modern neurotech manipulates it. EEG and acoustic stimulation replace color feedback, transforming emotional expression into emotional optimization. What began as aesthetic empathy now delivers measurable self-regulation.

3. HEADS-UP COMPUTING & INTERFACES

AI-First Head-Worn Computing for Task Guidance (Privacy-Forward, Camera-Optional)

Today, headsets are being reimagined for hands-free reasoning, not spectacle. The next interface is discreet, contextual, and human — guiding rather than broadcasting.

• Amazon Smart Glasses overlay navigation and scanning for last-mile delivery.

• Meta Ray-Ban Display and Meta × Oakley HSTN blend neural-gesture bands with lifestyle design.

• Samsung Galaxy Glasses (Project Haean) bring XR to Android.

• Alibaba Quark AI Glasses integrate payments, translation, and shopping.

• Taya AI Necklace reframes voice capture as jewelry.

• Friend AI Necklace sparked debate about privacy and AI companionship.

Then → Now: In 2014, On-Board Interface experiments like TapTap and Winky explored gesture and wink control. The same ambition - to make tech disappear into instinctive behavior - has re-emerged as discreet AI assistants built into glasses and jewelry. The interface has shifted from visible interaction to ambient cognition.

@cnetdotcomLike something out of a sci-fi movie, XPANCEO is testing the limits of vision tech with these smart contact lens prototypes, which may have have health and app uses in the future. Would you stick these in your eyes? 👀 #xpanceo #contactlenses #biotechnology #futuretech #mwc2025

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Retina-Grade Micro-Displays for XR

Micro-LED breakthroughs are making immersive computing truly wearable. Future Market Insights projects the wearable-display market > $235 B by 2035.
Vision itself is becoming the device.

• IntraPhoton develops three-layer stacked LEDs for retina-density color.

• Thunderbird X3 Pro and INMO AIR3 deliver award-winning AR glasses.

• Xpanceo prototypes smart contact lenses with zoom, night vision, and biometrics.

Then → Now: The telescopic contact lens and Argus II prototypes we reported on hinted at sensory augmentation; a decade later, that line runs straight to Xpanceo and IntraPhoton. Vision tech has evolved from accessibility to embodied computing, where optics become the processing surface itself.

4. PERFORMANCE, RECOVERY & PHYSICAL AUGMENTATION

Exoskeletal Assist - Wearable Performance Hardware

Mechanical augmentation is moving from rehabilitation to recreation. The wearable-robotic exoskeleton market (growing to $9.9 B by 2029) signals how robotics is becoming an everyday mobility layer.

• Nike Project Amplify merges motorized cuffs and footwear for assisted running.

• Ascentiz Exo-Belt offsets 66 lb through modular hip and knee supports.

• Hypershell X Ultra offers affordable endurance augmentation.

• Toyota Walk Me Chair replaces wheels with robotic legs that climb stairs — translating exosuit logic into inclusive mobility.

• Ekso Bionics continues bridging medical rehab and industrial use.

Then → Now: Your 2014 Bespoke Biotech section imagined 3D-printed prosthetics democratizing mobility. Those prototypes matured into exosuits and robotic chairs that amplify rather than restore. The assistive device has become an augmentation layer, blending rehabilitation, recreation, and design.

Thermoregulation Wearables for Muscle Relief & Circulatory Recovery

Thermoregulation wearables bring spa-grade cryo- and heat therapy to portable gear, letting athletes and workers manage circulation and muscle relief in motion. Heat and cooling therapies are being miniaturized into wearable formats that promote faster recovery.

• Nike × Hyperice Hyperboot delivers targeted compression and heat to prime or relax muscles.

• Eztia HydraVolt provides battery-free cooling for up to eight hours, used by military and construction workers to reduce heat strain and muscle fatigue.

• Himo Cool Pad for Wigs extends surface-cooling design into everyday comfort wearables.

Then → Now: Early experiments like Wristify framed temperature as comfort and energy efficiency. Now heat and cooling are precision recovery tools, engineered for circulation and muscular therapy rather than environmental adjustment.

Red-Light & Energy-Based Recovery Wearables

Light and vibration are joining heat and compression in the recovery toolkit, targeting tissue at a cellular level. Photobiomodulation wearables translate lab-grade recovery into compact, design-led consumer tools — evidence of the convergence between sports science, beauty tech, and wellness.

• FlexBeam uses red and near-infrared wavelengths to stimulate muscle repair and reduce inflammation.

• TheraFace Mask Glo combines LED and vibration therapy for circulation and skin recovery.

Then → Now: Photobiomodulation wasn’t on the 2014 radar - its emergence marks the field’s expansion from mechanical to cellular recovery systems, linking sports medicine, wellness, and beauty into one therapeutic continuum.

5. ATHLETE MONITORING & COACHING ECOSYSTEMS

Coach-Grade Athlete Monitoring & Integrated Training Systems

Athlete tracking is blending elite analytics with everyday sport. With the sports-analytics market expected to quadruple by 2032, the athlete’s body has become a connected dataset — and coaching a live feedback loop.

• Catapult Vector 8 monitors workload for 120 players simultaneously.

• Theo Alpha Shorts embed sensors for 3D form analysis.

• Evolve Mvmt detects fatigue and step quality from the ankle.

• Garmin Edge 550 & Rally Pedals connect cycling power, nutrition, and route data.

• Sports Impact Technologies measures concussion severity in real time.

• Nix Biosensors returns here as the bridge between biomarker insight and performance coaching.

Then → Now: 2014’s Responsive Coaching used posture bands and sensor socks for feedback; today’s platforms fuse that logic with live analytics, AI coaching, and biomarker integration. The wearable coach has matured from a nudge engine into a networked mentor, closing the loop between physiology, data, and motivation.

2014-2025 - What Remained the Same

When I compared the original 2014 findings with what the PSFK Trend Graph surfaced, I found that many of the underlying questions remain unchanged:

– Human–machine symbiosis still frames the narrative — we’re still exploring how technology amplifies, mirrors, or replaces human capability.
– Ethical and emotional undercurrents — privacy, empathy, and data sovereignty — continue to define trust and adoption.
– Form-factor experimentation — from rings to textiles to implants — still drives invention at the edges of design.

The materials, sensors, and algorithms may be new, but the human story hasn’t moved as far as we think.

So What Next?

2036: Wearables as the tissue for a planetary intelligence system

Today’s signals reveal the emergence of the body as an operating system — a continuous interface where sensing, computation, and design combine to amplify what humans can sense, endure, and achieve. When I pushed the PSFK Graph to think further out, the system began to trace a more radical horizon. The forecast it generated isn’t a prediction so much as a thought experiment - a way to imagine where today’s signals could lead if they keep compounding.

By 2036, our model suggests that “wearables” may no longer exist as products at all, but as part of a distributed intelligence system connecting bodies, environments, and machines. It’s an extraordinary vision - and maybe a useful one. Because every time technology feels intimate again, from sensors to AI, we’re reminded how innovation starts: by trying to understand ourselves through our tools.

The PSFK Graph didn’t just show a future of devices; it revealed a future of relationships — between humans, systems, and the living world they’re both building.

Here’s the forecast for wearables in 2036:

1. Neural implants, exo-memory clouds, and bio-AI symbiosis mean perception and computation flow together. Human identity fragments across embodied and synthetic selves that operate in parallel. (yeah, whoa - Pluribus type stuff.)

2. Sensors evolve into a planetary nervous system. Your body’s chemistry is linked to atmospheric data, supply chains, and social emotion streams. Health, weather, and emotion are treated as a single continuous dataset.

3. The old privacy model collapses under continuous biometric disclosure. In its place: bio-sovereign states - jurisdictions and communities that define rights over data emitted by living bodies.

4. CRISPR-adjacent nanotech and adaptive exoskeletons accelerate real-time gene expression and muscular response. Species identity becomes fluid: cyborgs, bio-synthetics, and AI-guided organisms coexist. (In 10 years, I dunno but maybe glimpses of this).

5. AR lenses and neural projection make spatial computing omnipresent, but indistinguishable from perception. Physical and digital collapse into an unbroken sensory field. (Very Black Mirror)

6. People outsource survival to automation and focus on curating states of being. The wellness industry becomes a metaphysical infrastructure managing mind-states rather than body metrics.
   

Dreamy stuff… And you just wanted some ideas about what to get your partner for the Holidays!

Piers Fawkes - piers@psfk.com

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Instead of listening to the opinions from the various thought leaders in the space, I wanted to build a narrative about AI from the ground up by focusing the PSFK Trend Intelligence system to gather examples of start-ups, experimental retail projects and new innovation. When I ran our pattern-recognition workflows across this dataset, a story emerged about the living, breathing, decision-making organization.

The data points to three big directions in artificial intelligence:

• The Enterprise on Autopilot — the modern corporation that learns to run itself.

• The Perpetually Present Brand — the brand that’s ambient, adaptive, and always there (if you want it to be).

• The Autonomous Workforce — machines with independent “brains” taking control of physical work.

Each theme presents huge opportunities — and equally big questions about what happens to the people and communities inside these systems.

Let’s unpack the examples behind these patterns first, and circle back to the human impact after.

- Piers

1. The Enterprise on Autopilot

The modern corporation is learning to run itself. Whatever the sector, AI shifting from acting as co-pilot to running the process. From regulated workflows to creative production, intelligent systems are taking ownership of work that once required human judgment, documentation, or approval.

These agents aren’t just executing tasks they’ve been prompted to respond to - they are learning, verifying and self-improving in a closed loop systems. When we studied this transformation we found four fundamental capabilities that define the self-driving organization:

• Knowledge Loops that teach and retain institutional insight,

• Regulated Automation that performs and audits complex legal or financial tasks,

• Clinical Precision that records and validates care in real time, and

• Creative Continuity that produces and updates content endlessly.

Knowledge Loops: When AI Learns How You Work

Knowledge doesn’t live in manuals, onboarding videos or standup meetings. Inside the self-driving enterprise, AI captures how people think, teach, and decide > then reuses that intelligence at scale. From classrooms to corporate learning systems, organizations are training models that absorb context, feedback, and institutional memory.

From Teaching to Training the Machine

A great place to see the weak signals that indicate the future of corporate learning in by seeing what’s going on in education. For example, TrueMark gives educators a “safe sandbox” for AI-assisted writing and feedback, suggesting that learning can be accelerated without shortcutting integrity. Emy extends the idea with private tutors trained on each institution’s curriculum, letting students query their own course material by text or video. At the frontier, Stanford’s Clinical Mind AI turns patient simulations into living datasets for medical reasoning.

From Policy to Platform Memory

As adoption widens, two-thirds of higher-education institutions are already formalizing AI use and Microsoft’s AI in Education 2025 Report shows leaders deploying AI for analytics and administration. Even consumer tools are aligning: Grammarly’s AI Grader gives students pre-submission feedback tuned to instructor expectations.

Takeaway:
Organizations are beginning to learn in real time. By encoding expertise into adaptive models, they’re creating institutional memory that never retires — a continuous feedback loop where every answer teaches the system to answer better.

Accountable Automation: AI That Justifies Every Decision

Compliance used to slow business down; now it’s what makes automation possible.

By embedding verifiable reasoning, timestamps, and source citations into every action, AI can perform regulated work and simultaneously generate the audit trail that proves it was done correctly. We see weak signals in law, finance, and governance that show how corporations will use AI to close the gap between execution and explanation > turning oversight into a framework that innovation can thrive within.

From Drafts to Defensible Outputs

Mary Technology automates legal chronologies and fact patterns, cutting prep time by up to 90 percent with 99 percent accuracy. SpotDraft takes agreements from draft to e-signature in a single AI-driven, audit-compliant environment, while BRYTER blends generative reasoning with workflow logic to build hybrid legal agents. In Brazil, Lexter deploys Laura an AI paralegal that automates firm operations end-to-end.

From Risk to Reliability

Studies estimate that 75 percent of legal-firm tasks could be automated ), and that lawyers lose 30–40 percent of their time to admin. With retrieval-augmented generation and verifiable sourcing, firms can now delegate safely: the system that writes the clause can also cite the case.

Takeaway:
AI-driven automation inside the enterprise is gaining authority because it can defend its work. When every action is timestamped, sourced, and explainable, compliance stops being a brake on innovation and becomes the framework within which innovation can thrive.

Clinical Precision: What Healthcare Teaches Us About Automated Accuracy

If we look at the medical field, we can see showing how verifiable, workflow-embedded intelligence could evolve inside organizations across sectors » where AI doesn’t just record work, but completes it. In medicine, documentation is treatment. AI is now embedded inside electronic health records, performing charting, coding, and compliance work automatically so clinicians can focus on patients. What began as dictation is becoming full-cycle clinical intelligence.

From Notes to Numbers

Arintra automates chart review and guideline-based coding across major EHRs, improving charge capture and cutting denials. Abridge turns doctor–patient conversations into structured notes, while Docology condenses complex referral packets into concise patient timelines. NeuralWave handles non-billable tasks that drain clinical time and attention.

From Burnout to Balance

Administrative load is one of healthcare’s largest costs—financial and human. Analysts now track the rise of autonomous Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) systems validating notes in real time. These embedded systems show how automation can coexist with accountability: clinicians supply context, AI supplies completion. What’s happening in hospitals today will soon reach every sector that depends on high-stakes documentation—from insurance underwriting to engineering compliance.

Takeaway:
AI is becoming medicine’s invisible colleague—documenting every detail, coding every encounter, and proving every claim so care can return to conversation. And as other industries adopt the same loop of capture-and-verify automation, the enterprise begins to cure its administrative overload.

Creative Continuity: Content That Never Sleeps

Creativity used to end at the deadline; but AI has changed the scenario. From film production to brand marketing, generative systems now plan, make, and update creative work continuously : learning from performance data to refine style and strategy.

From Concept to Continuous Production

OpenAI × Vertigo Films condensed feature-film timelines to nine months with Critterz, while Adobe’s Unfinished Film invited creators to remix footage globally. Channel 4 uses generative-AI ads for SMEs, and R/GA × Moncler proved luxury storytelling could be rendered by code.

From Campaigns to Living Systems

MERGE, erm, merges emotional storytelling with data intelligence to craft personalized content. Warner Bros. Discovery integrates shoppable scenes directly into TV shows, shortening the path from desire to purchase by 50 percent. Meanwhile, Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl model hints at a new economics for machine-made media.

Takeaway:
Content is no longer a campaign; it’s a continuum. As creative work becomes self-updating, brands and studios alike are learning to manage stories that never stop producing themselves.

2. The Perpetually Present Brand

The new brand doesn’t sleep.

Across categories, AI is evolving from campaign to companion - a constant, intelligent presence that listens, remembers, and responds. Whether it’s guiding a purchase, checking a pulse, or shaping a mood, these systems live alongside the user rather than in front of them. The brand of tomorrow is ambient, adaptive, and always there.

Conversational Commerce: When Shopping Talks Back

Commerce is turning conversational. AI-powered chat, voice, and multimodal interfaces are collapsing discovery, personalization, and checkout into a single exchange — where every word becomes measurable intent.

From Product Pages to Dialogue

Jack in the Box launched DealQuest: Revenge of the Munchies, a generative, text-driven game that rewards players with meal deals, turning storytelling into transaction. American Airlines now lets travelers plan by simply typing “a beach vacation in February,” while Zapia embeds a shopping assistant directly in WhatsApp for millions across Latin America. Beauty brands such as Mary Kay and Chalhoub Group are merging chat, computer vision, and personalization to convert curiosity into commerce.

From Search to Sentience

The conversational commerce market is projected to reach $290 billion by 2025, with over 60% of consumers already using conversational AI when shopping (BigSur AI; Bloomreach). From Klarna’s in-app AI stylist to eBay’s ChatGPT-powered traffic surge, the storefront is becoming a two-way conversation.

Takeaway:
Shopping is no longer a funnel — it’s a feedback loop. Every interaction is both a transaction and a training set, teaching the brand how to talk back.

Ambient Care: Support That Never Signs Off

Care is becoming invisible but ever-present. From mental health to elder care, AI systems now sense emotional, behavioral, and environmental changes—and respond in real time. Where adaptive companions interact through conversation, ambient care works through context: a quiet intelligence that listens and intervenes only when needed.

From Scheduled to Sustained Care

Kai merges clinical insight with AI empathy, providing 24/7 emotional support for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Mindologue decodes doodles to assess mood and tailor mindfulness experiences, while MedLink Global offers AI-guided psychiatric assessments and treatment recommendations for complex cases.

From Check-Ins to Continuous Context

KuboCare uses radar-based sensing in senior facilities to monitor health without cameras, alerting caregivers when patterns shift. Together these systems form a new model for ambient care—assistance that is proactive, respectful, and quietly omnipresent.

Takeaway:
Support is no longer an event; it’s an environment. The most trusted services will be the ones that stay with you, even when you’re not asking for help.

Adaptive Companions: Interfaces That Build Relationships

Interfaces are becoming the front line of brand loyalty. Generative and agentic systems now remember, anticipate, and respond across every touchpoint—turning the customer interface into the relationship itself. If ambient care listens quietly in the background, adaptive companions speak directly, shaping how consumers feel and interact with the brand day to day.

From Assistance to Attachment

Chalhoub Group’s Layla AI increases engagement and boosts smaller-brand visibility across 950 stores by acting like a digital beauty advisor. Klarna’s AI assistant handles 700,000 conversations a month, driving measurable productivity gains. Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph feels like a stylist who already knows your wardrobe.

From Interface to Relationship Surface

As these agents persist across chat, voice, and augmented-reality layers, they carry memory and tone from one channel to the next. Each exchange reinforces the sense of continuity—a customer never starts over, and the brand always remembers where the conversation left off. The interface becomes the emotional handshake between human and company.

Takeaway:
The new loyalty isn’t earned—it’s experienced. Adaptive companions make brands feel human by turning every interaction into a living, remembered relationship.

Responsive Experiences: Environments That Feel Alive

The physical and digital merge in real time. Sensors, spatial models, and adaptive AI are transforming stores, screens, and spaces into responsive environments that sense presence, predict need, and adjust dynamically.

From Static Spaces to Sensing Systems

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display and its neural gesture band bring ambient interaction to the face, while Vision AI retail systems turn stores into perceptive ecosystems that understand movement, inventory, and emotion. Hospitality platforms like Hotel Communication Network and RoomRaccoon are layering sensors and AI concierges to make spaces adaptive and self-orchestrating.

From Reactions to Anticipation

Every interaction becomes data — every signal, a chance to respond. As multimodal AI connects sight, sound, and sentiment, environments gain awareness. Retail and hospitality are leading the way, but the implications stretch to mobility, healthcare, and the home.

Takeaway:
These adaptive systems in stores and hotels hint at what’s next for offices, mobility, and smart homes—environments that sense and respond. Experience is no longer designed; it’s detected. The next generation of environments won’t just react to us — they’ll recognize us.

3. Autonomous Robotic Workforce: When Machines Start Thinking With Their Hands

AI is leaving the screen and stepping into the world. Across warehouses, retail floors, and construction sites, machines are gaining sensory awareness, decision-making capability, and the ability to coordinate with one another. What began as automation is evolving into embodiment > a new kind of workforce that can perceive, plan, and act in the same spaces humans do.

Perceptive Infrastructure

Cameras, sensors, and spatial models are becoming the eyes and ears of autonomous environments. Vision systems like those driving Meta’s Ray-Ban Display and Everybot’s AI modules show how perception can now be embedded anywhere—from eyewear to cleaning robots.

At the research frontier, the Butter-Bench project has introduced a benchmark for embodied language models—LLMs that can reason spatially and act physically. It measures how well AI systems can perceive, manipulate, and communicate in real environments. While even top models score around 40% compared to humans’ 95%, the experiment reveals the future path: AI that doesn’t just recognize scenes but reasons within them.

Task-Specific Autonomy by Embedding Modular AI Brains

The next generation of robots is being built for precision, not generality. Wayve uses NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor to upgrade its autonomous driving platform, while Danghong Technology and Everybot are mass-producing modular AI brains for service, drone, and industrial robots. These platforms are shifting robotics from bespoke engineering to configurable autonomy — systems that can be dropped into any form factor or task.

Coordinated Swarms Of Robotic Talent

The leap from individual robots to networked cognition is already under way. Internal strategy documents reveal Amazon is working toward automating 75% of its U.S. operations, potentially replacing 600,000 human roles by 2033 and saving $12.6 billion by 2027. The plan hinges on bipedal bots like Digit and on cloud-based orchestration that allows machines to move in unison across massive logistics networks. As embodied AI gains conversational reasoning through LLMs, these “agent swarms” could soon collaborate across industries - manufacturing, shipping, even urban infrastructure.

Takeaway:
Robotics is moving from motion to motive. As machines learn to see, specialize, and coordinate, the physical world becomes a cognitive network — one where intelligence is not housed in a device, but distributed across everything that moves.

So where does this analysis leave us?

These themes have all been built around AI-related data the PSFK Trends Intelligence system has gathered in the last 120 days. Compare them with the results from a prompt in ChatGPT and you should understand why we’re building special knowledge graphs to help organizations improve their systems.

It also gives me some key topics to ask my panelists on the 12th

The Human Role in an Autonomous Age

1. Defining the Problem

Once systems can execute, the human role moves upstream. Our role at work is to frame what the system should optimize for - not how to perform each step.
How do we decide what matters, what success means, and where the system’s blind spots are?

2. Redefining the Moats

Every advantage that can be automated will be. What remain are moats built on human networks and emotion:
• Access - who you know, which data or partnerships you can tap.
• Permission - the social and regulatory license to operate.
• Attachment - customer loyalty, employee culture, brand love.

Are these the new defensible advantages in a world of automated parity?

3. The Limits of Automation

You can’t automate a customer’s heart. Efficiency can win a transaction, but it can’t earn devotion. If love and loyalty are part of the human condition, how do we design for them inside automated systems?

4. Preserving Slack

Automation removes friction - but also removes slack. When everything is optimized for throughput, a single outage can cascade across networks (AWS style). Is the human role now to design and preserve slack—manual overrides, redundancies, emergency playbooks, and people who know how to operate without the system?

“Sport now gives us the same shared language that music once did - it’s how we define ourselves, our values, and our tribes.”

Provoked I was. So I put my coins in the PSFK Trends Intelligence jukebox to see what the system would play - what patterns it would find in the last 120 days of data and examples we’ve been tracking. The result is a research piece that explores what’s happening across sport - for the teams, the players, the fans, the media companies, and the sponsors.

Even if you’re not directly working in sport, it still reveals what’s happening in one of the most important engines of consumer culture today. - Piers

FOR THE TEAMS

From Uniform to Mission Statement

Sports apparel is shedding its functional identity and becoming a vehicle for both conscience and culture. Around the world, clubs and brands are reimagining kits and merch not just as uniforms, but as storytelling platforms that reflect values, communities, and creativity.

Purpose & Planet

A wave of sustainability experimentation is reshaping the apparel lifecycle. Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise has chosen to keep one of its jerseys for two seasons-a small but symbolic stand against fast fashion’s wasteful churn. In Brazil, Grêmio’s collaboration with Umbro celebrates the biodiversity of Rio Grande do Sul while using its anniversary kit to raise environmental awareness. Liverpool’s latest drop with Adidas extends purpose beyond performance, channeling jersey profits tied to player Diogo Jota toward a new community soccer program. With fashion responsible for roughly 10 percent of global carbon emissions and 20 percent of water pollution (ISPO), these efforts align with a wider shift toward circular models-repair programs, take-back schemes, and resale platforms built on provenance and transparency. Consumer research backs this up: 65 percent of shoppers say they would choose more sustainable products when possible.

Culture & Connection

Sports kits are also evolving into cultural artifacts that carry narrative and identity. Barcelona’s extended partnership with Spotify cements the jersey as a space for artist collaborations and digital fan activations. In New York, the Giants × The Brigade capsule for Latino Heritage Month turns team merch into cultural celebration. Michelob ULTRA × Hypegolf brings streetwear and sport together through limited-edition drops timed to the Ryder Cup. Even Nike’s latest “Why Do It?” campaign-narrated by Tyler, the Creator-pushes apparel storytelling into emotional territory, replacing triumph with vulnerability. Each example reflects the same evolution: kits are becoming media-designed to be worn, shared, felt and reacted to.

Takeaway:
According to McKinsey’s Sporting Goods 2025 report, global sporting goods sales are set to grow about 6% annually through 2029, with challenger brands gaining share by aligning sustainability with identity. As the global football-kit market (soccer) surpasses $13 billion, apparel’s future lies in merging ethics with aesthetics. The next generation of jerseys won’t just represent teams-they’ll represent what those teams stand for.

Culture in Motion: Streetwear Redefines Sport

Even as jerseys evolve from mission statements into lifestyle symbols, other boundaries between sport and style continues to blur. Athletic apparel can be about performance but it’s also about presence » reinterpreted by designers, beauty brands, and DTC newcomers as a canvas for identity and everyday culture.

From Sideline to Catwalk

Luxury, fashion, and performance labels are deepening ties with sport to stay relevant with younger consumers. Louis Vuitton’s partnership with the Real Madrid women’s team brings couture precision to the locker room, introducing bespoke travel and formal wear that merges club heritage with French craftsmanship. In South Korea, Le Coq Sportif, Lynx, and K2 are releasing culture-first fall collections months early to offset slower retail sales - blending performance tech with everyday wearability. Japan’s Goldwin 0 launched a minimalist “Performance Capsule” inspired by trail running, translating its outdoor heritage into refined technical pieces for urban life (Wallpaper). The momentum reflects a market on the rise: the global streetwear sector is forecast to hit $371 billion in 2025 and $637 billion by 2032. McKinsey’s report also notes that consumers increasingly view activewear as part of personal identity, fueling category blurring between performance, fashion, and lifestyle.

Beauty, Identity & Inclusivity

Beyond apparel, beauty and personal-care brands are embedding themselves into sport culture. e.l.f. Cosmetics has added women’s soccer to its expanding sponsorship slate - which already includes the Professional Women’s Hockey League and Paralympic athletes - as part of a campaign for equity and visibility in sport. Nyx Professional Makeup spotlights Angel City FC players Alyssa and Gisele Thompson in its “Make Them Look” campaign, positioning beauty as a form of confidence and fandom expression. Skims, meanwhile, is moving deeper into women’s sport via a loungewear partnership with League One Volleyball - extending Kim Kardashian’s brand into a community-driven athletics network. At the grassroots level, new identity-driven labels such as &ndy bring queer representation and minimalist design into activewear, signalling a generation that values purpose as much as performance.

Takeaway:
As sport collides with culture, the locker room becomes the new atelier. Whether through beauty tie-ins, luxury tailoring, or indie labels championing inclusion, the future of sportswear belongs to brands that can speak fluently across performance, fashion, and identity.

FOR THE ATHLETES & PLAYERS

Precision in Motion: Sensors Bring Elite Insight to Everyone

As connected sensors and biomechanical AI converge, training is shifting from intuition to evidence. Once reserved for elite teams and lab settings, movement data is becoming the foundation of everyday performance - transforming how athletes, coaches, and clinicians prevent injury and personalize training.

From Pro Labs to Gym Floors

What began with Olympic-grade analytics is now built into activewear and fitness apps. Theo Health’s Alpha Shorts, tested by golfer Xander Schauffele, bring lab-quality motion capture to athletes through embedded sensors that translate movement into real-time feedback. Model Health has gone one step further, using just two iPhones to generate 3D models that measure form, power, and injury risk - lowering the cost of biomechanics from thousands to hundreds. Platforms like Virtuagym’s Max AI Coach are layering those insights with personalized training plans, making precision coaching scalable across gyms and digital ecosystems.

From Load Management to Safety Nets

As fitness intelligence deepens, devices are tackling health and safety head-on. Sports Impact Technologies’ behind-the-ear sensor detects concussion severity mid-play and alerts staff in real time. Strength specialists Eleiko are embedding data capture directly into barbells to monitor technique and training loads, bridging performance and prevention. These advances sit within a booming sector - the global sports science equipment market, now $15 billion, is expected to triple by 2033. Eight in ten fitness wearables now include AI algorithms, and 73% of users say they prefer virtual AI trainers - evidence that the once-niche quantified-training market has gone mainstream.

Takeaway:
The quantified athlete is no longer a pro-only phenomenon. As sensors, software, and AI merge into everyday gear, the line between lab data and lived experience is disappearing - enabling every athlete to train, recover, and protect themselves with elite precision.

Athletes as Brands: Turning Performance into Products

Athlete-founded brands aren’t new - from Cristiano Ronaldo’s CR7 and Tom Brady’s TB12 to Stephen Curry’s Curry Brand, stars have long turned personal performance into products. But a new era is emerging. Today’s athletes are building multi-category ecosystems, moving from endorsement deals to equity-driven ventures that span hydration, skincare, fashion, and home recovery. Enabled by NIL frameworks, DTC infrastructure, and global licensing, this next generation of athlete brands is less about merch and more about monetizing trust at scale.

From Endorsement to Ownership

Athletes now serve as both the face and founders of new consumer categories. Caitlin Clark’s partnership with Stanley 1913 debuts a signature hydration line that extends the brand’s reach into the performance lifestyle space. In Korea, sports organization SY launched Verite Homme, a men’s skincare label fronted by its own players - merging athlete identity with product storytelling. Performance-wear company Vuori is doubling down on athlete credibility, expanding its ambassador roster to include NFL quarterback Jared Goff and tennis player Jack Draper as it grows into global markets.

A survey this year found that 87% of consumers are more likely to purchase products endorsed by athletes they follow - a data point that underscores the shift from influencer to investor.

From Courts to Culture

Luxury and legacy brands are equally leaning into athlete-led storytelling. Lacoste’s ‘GOAT’ capsule with Novak Djokovic temporarily replaced its iconic crocodile logo with a green goat - turning an athlete narrative into collectible fashion. Nike’s global collaboration with Lego reimagines play and movement for kids through sneaker sets and apparel that merge creativity with sport. Meanwhile, youth sport itself has become a $40 billion industry - powered by families investing in athletic aspiration and gear from retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods, whose loyalty program has amplified recurring purchases. Deloitte projects women’s elite sports to generate $2.35 billion globally in 2025, underscoring the commercial headroom for athlete-led ventures and brand extensions.

Takeaway:
The modern athlete isn’t just a competitor - they’re a creator and a category in motion. As sport, commerce, and culture fuse, the next generation of brands will be built not around teams, but around the trusted individuals who inspire them.

FOR THE BRANDS, PARTNERS & SPONSORS

Game Spaces: The Rise of Experiential Flagships

Physical venues are becoming programmable ecosystems where fandom, retail, and recreation converge. From courts and concept stores to pop-ups and performance hubs, the store is a new frontier of sports engagement is built for interaction, immersion, and community.

From Retail Floors to Fan Worlds

Around the world, brands are re-engineering space as experience. Skechers’ new Performance store in Miami spans over 26,000 square feet and blends running tracks, sport-specific courts, and digital displays to turn product demos into participation. In Shenzhen, ANTA’s ‘Basketball Arena’ merges a full competition court with retail zones and cultural installations - a hybrid arena-as-store that captures basketball’s creative energy. In Paris, Atelier Alpine extends motorsport into lifestyle, offering driving simulators, F1 screenings, and a motorsport bar that turns brand heritage into hands-on entertainment.

From Pop-Ups to Playgrounds

Sports culture is now colonizing main streets and social calendars. Pickleball venues like The Pickle Pad and Chicken N Pickle are scaling from courts to social destinations with dining, events, and even delivery-app tie-ins. The League Group’s celebrity-filled basketball nights at SRGN Studios in Los Angeles blur sport, nightlife, and internet culture. Meanwhile, brands such as Tiffany & Co. and CLOT are inserting luxury and fashion into sport’s physical footprint - with Tiffany’s US Open activation and CLOT’s Country Club Wimbledon pop-up transforming tournaments into cultural runways.

From Gyms to Global Challenges

Even fitness brands are reframing space as connective media. On’s new flagship in Singapore doubles as a community hub with interactive design, group runs, and a Federer co-designed tennis zone . VersaClimber’s ‘Expedition Everest’ challenge united 3,000 climbers worldwide in a virtual ascent that doubled studio participation and underscored a new model of hybrid physical-digital events.

Takeaway:
The Sporting Goods 2025 report highlights that as online channels saturate, physical retail must evolve into “destination experiences” that deepen community engagement - exactly what these new flagship formats deliver. With the experiential retail market nearing $85 billion and growing 14% annually, sports brands are designing fan spaces as platforms - modular, data-rich environments that host shopping, sport, and storytelling under one roof. The future of fandom will be built, not broadcast.

Brands as Studios: Owning the Sports Story

With 65% of fans frustrated by juggling multiple streaming apps and over half saying games are harder to find than a year ago, a new broadcast loop is emerging - one powered not by networks, but by brands. Retailers and marketers are building in-house studios, long-form series, and live-shop formats that link inspiration directly to commerce. Instead of renting airtime, they’re becoming the producers - turning their own stories, athletes, and partnerships into content ecosystems that reach fans where traditional media no longer can.

From Sponsor to Storyteller

Dick’s Sporting Goods has expanded its in-house Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, developing long-form originals such as a Little League World Series documentary produced with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. The move builds on Dick’s two Sports Emmy wins and cements its position as both retailer and storyteller - part of a wider shift where brands own the narrative, not just the sponsorship.

Walmart’s partnership with Major League Soccer applies the same logic globally: beyond stadium ads, the collaboration includes co-branded programming around televised matches and a dedicated soccer hub on Walmart.com. Together, they’re turning retail into a media network - not just a point of sale.

From Ads to Art Direction

As audiences tune out short-form interruptions, brands are rediscovering the power of long-form storytelling. A recent It’s Nice That analysis highlighted a new wave of brand filmmaking - from Patagonia’s environmental documentaries and Rapha’s mini-films to Adidas’ feature-length releases and Nike’s reflective Substack, In The Margins. These aren’t ads - they’re cultural artifacts that trade in depth, identity, and narrative consistency.

Takeaway:
The future of sports media won’t just be streamed - it will be staged, sold, and owned by the brands confident enough to tell their own story.

SIDE BAR: JOIN PSFK’S WEBINAR ON 2026 TRENDS!!

In partnership with Waldo, PSFK’s Piers Fawkes will be hosting our 10 recommendations on how brands could ‘be’ in 2026. Free to attend via LinkedIn on November 12.

FOR THE COMMUNITY & FANS

Leveling the Field: From Grassroots to Game-Changers

Sport’s next evolution isn’t about bigger arenas - it’s about broader access. From youth programs and mini-pitches to equity-sharing leagues, clubs and sponsors are investing in participation as a long-term strategy for both growth and good. McKinsey estimates that 1.8 billion people globally are insufficiently active, spotlighting why investment in youth programs and inclusive sport design is both a social and economic imperative.

From Community Grounds to Global Goals

Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, Airbnb joined the FIFA NY/NJ Host Committee to fund five new mini-soccer pitches across New York’s boroughs, plus youth clinics and fan festivals - a $288 million regional impact that ties tourism to local sport. Arsenal FC and Unilever’s Dirt Is Good program are doing similar work through campaigns tackling period stigma and grassroots tournaments like the Varzenal Cup. It’s part of a youth-sports boom: U.S. spending on complexes has surged from under $200 million to $1.3 billion in just eight years.

From Participation Gaps to Player Power

At the same time, brands are tackling inequity and ownership in women’s sport. ASICS’ Undropped Kit, co-created with Inclusive Sportswear and the charity Mind, redesigns PE uniforms to keep more girls playing beyond age 16. Burn Boot Camp’s ‘Proud’ campaign amplifies female strength and confidence through member storytelling. And Unrivaled, the women’s 3-on-3 basketball league backed by Serena Ventures, now values at $340 million - paying six-figure salaries and granting players equity stakes. McKinsey estimates women’s sports carry a $2.5 billion monetization opportunity as audiences and investors align.

Takeaway:
Whether through mini-pitches or million-dollar leagues, the next wave of sports investment is participatory. The playing field is being rebuilt from the ground up - and this time, access and equity are part of the business plan.

Play to Stay: Gamified Loyalty and Fan Ecosystems

As attention splinters across platforms, the next race in sport isn’t for reach - it’s for retention. Brands are designing loyalty as a game, blending data, competition, and community to keep fans and members engaged long after the first signup.

From Workouts to Worlds

Connected-fitness platforms are leading the charge. iFit’s new racing feature, built with Ergatta, lets users race themselves or others across bikes, rowers, and treadmills, driving major jumps in session frequency. Peloton’s partnership with Hyrox extends its reach into the functional-fitness circuit with co-branded race prep classes and on-demand series, deepening loyalty through challenge-based training.

From Points to Personalized Play

AI is redefining the fan loop. Sahha.ai now integrates wearable data from 300+ devices to deliver standardized health scores and personalized engagement tools for fitness brands. Capgemini reports that 54% of sports fans already use AI or generative AI to personalize their content feeds - evidence that individualization is now the baseline expectation. With 86.8% of gym owners expecting membership growth this year and fitness-app downloads rising to nearly 3.8 billion, the incentive to turn workouts into ongoing games has never been higher.

From Fans to Ecosystems

The gamification layer is expanding from workouts to fandom itself. Trace, founded by ex-adidas exec Tareq Nazlawy, builds collectible-driven fan identities that unlock access, status, and rewards; its pilot with the ATP Tour increased known fan databases by 25%. Meanwhile, Genius Sports’ acquisition of Sports Innovation Lab brings analytics and sponsorship valuation together to help rights holders measure - and monetize - engagement across these new loops.

Takeaway:
From fitness studios to stadiums, engagement is becoming participatory - scored, shared, and rewarded. As gamification merges with identity and data, loyalty stops being a program and starts becoming a lifestyle.

Final Thought:
As Justin Quirk argued, sport may have replaced music as our most dynamic cultural code — the place where identity, creativity, and belonging now intersect. Looking across these signals, it’s clear that the stadium (and store, somewhat) has become the new stage: where brands, athletes, and fans remix culture in real time, and where the soundtrack of modern life is increasingly set to the rhythm of sport. With 6% annual growth projected by McKinsey, the winners will be those who see sport not as a category, but as a canvas for culture, technology, and connection.

The themes, trends, patterns and ideas in this email were surfaced by PSFK’s trend intelligence system. For over 20 years, PSFK has been known for delivering the best trends research for major corporations.

Piers Fawkes
Founder, PSFK & Retail Innovation Week newsletter

The latest is on Leisure as Strategy, and it got me thinking about the travel and hospitality signals surfacing in the PSFK Intelligence System I’m builing. His central insight - that “the next frontier of customer experience is about time, not transactions” - captures something we’re seeing across every layer of the sector.

For Giuseppe, leisure isn’t a pause between moments of productivity; it’s the arena where meaning, creativity, and connection happen. As automation frees up more human hours, the question becomes how brands help people spend that time well.

When I ran a 90-day scan across PSFK’s travel and hospitality data, the same theme appeared again and again: hospitality systems are being redesigned for presence rather than speed, coherence rather than throughput. Experience is now treated as infrastructure - a layered architecture that optimizes for comfort, recovery, and intention.

From multifunctional hotels that blend work, wellness, and culture, to AI-driven orchestration platforms that turn logistics into choreography, the future of travel is less about movement and more about design for meaningful time. It’s leisure engineered: measurable, regenerative, and human.

Below, I’ve organized the latest travel and hospitality trends into four clusters that together describe this transformation - from how we rebuild space and automate journeys, to how we embed sustainability, culture, and identity into every mile.

Piers, Founder, PSFK

Four Trending Themes Driving Modern Travel

1. The New Systems of Travel & Stay – reprogramming space, service, and experience.

2. The Automated & Orchestrated Journey – automation becomes orchestration.

3. The Sustainable Infrastructure Shift – from compliance to regeneration.

4. The Cultural & Design Renaissance – grounding innovation in heritage and identity.

I. The New Systems of Travel & Stay

Rebuilding the experience layer for modern travelers.

1. Mixed-Use & Multifunctional Hospitality

Hotels evolve into adaptive, multi-programmed assets blending hospitality with work, wellness, and community.

I thought one of the interesting patterns in the data was how hotel and real estate groups were shifting properties from static lodging to programmable spaces that sustain continuous occupancy and diversified revenue. Rove Hotels and IRTH Group launched HQ by Rove in Dubai’s Business Bay and Marasi Bay Marina — modular, hospitality-led offices that merge work, life, and leisure through smart design and shared amenities. Faubourg Galant in Paris adds coworking, a cocktail bar, and wellness zones within a 63-room hotel. The July London (featured in the video above) blends Art Deco lodging with communal dining and meeting spaces for both long- and short-stay guests. Zoku Amsterdam’s hybrid micro-lofts combine living, working, and social areas for remote residents, while The Ned London converts a historic bank into a hotel-members’ club with restaurants, retail, and events.

These models signal hospitality’s evolution toward mixed-use ecosystems acting as community and commerce hubs.

2. Cabin Segmentation & Premiumization

Airlines modularize comfort and yield through design and tiering.

Having fallen out of status on Delta since the pandemic ended, this theme jumped out at me as I sat at the back of the AUS-JFK flight yesterday: a big investment in improving the experience between basic and first.

Carriers are engineering cabins for granular traveler segments—introducing mid-tier premium classes, ergonomic seating, and new entertainment hardware. LATAM Airlines Group and Recaro Aircraft Seating are refitting Boeing 787s with PL3530 premium-class seats featuring 40-inch pitch, privacy wings, and 4K screens. Korean Air has launched a Premium Class between economy and business on 777-300ERs, expanding space ≈ 50 percent and upgrading amenities. Emirates is expanding Premium Economy to 68 destinations with wider seats and enhanced service. Also, rumors have it that Delta will be making an announcement soon telling flyers (and ex-Diamond status members :) about ‘premiumization’ plans. .

Cabin design is becoming both a profit lever and a brand signature — comfort as commerce.

3. Precision Recovery Hospitality

Wellness in hospitality moves from lifestyle offering to performance product.

Ok, ok - I was a little worried about telling readers that wellness was a travel trend but when I drilled deeper I started to see that rather than a feature of a hospitality experience, health is the concept.

From Proper Hotels Santa Monica’s shoppable Wellness Suites—outfitted with red-light therapy, dual-zone mattresses, and Peloton bikes - to sleep maximized Equinox Hotels New York and Mandarin Oriental’s biometric spa diagnostics, metric-driven wellness - and particularly recovery - has become the central focus of the stay.

At the restorative end, Evia Retreat, Meliá Hotels, and Appellation’s collaboration with the Chopra Foundation integrate eco-design, meditation, and whole-being itineraries that merge emotional and physiological renewal.

As the wellness-tourism market surpasses $1 trillion, performance-based rest is fast becoming the new definition of luxury.

II. The Automated & Orchestrated Journey

From check-in to check-out, automation becomes orchestration.

4. Hospitality AI & Automation Platforms

Property intelligence turns operations into predictive systems.

Automation is moving from back-office efficiency to front-of-house experience design.

In the data collected by PSFK’s trend intelligence system, I could see how property-management consolidation and conversational AI are reshaping how hotels are run. Guesty has been selected as the preferred PMS for Casago, following its acquisition of Vacasa; the combined group now manages 40,000 vacation rentals through Guesty’s unified platform. RoomRaccoon partnered with GuestButler to launch an AI-powered WhatsApp automation tool that answers ≈ 80 percent of guest inquiries. Hotel Communication Network (HCN) introduced a voice-activated AI Concierge accessible via in-room tablets, while Inntelo raised £500k to scale its own AI concierge for Park Hall Resort & Spa. The AI-in-hospitality market is projected to grow from $0.15 billion in 2024 to $0.23 billion in 2025 at a 56 percent CAGR. A global study by h2c Global found that 78 percent of hotel chains already use AI, with 89 percent planning to expand within two years.

Together these moves mark the shift from manual management to predictive, self-orchestrating hotels.

5. Chat- and OS-Layer Travel Orchestration

The journey is managed through conversational control towers.

This might not surprise anyone reading a PSFK newsletter but AI assistants are fast becoming the main interface to travel - helping coordinating itineraries, bookings, and recovery directly inside chat and operating systems. By merging APIs for transport, payments, and identity, orchestration is shifting from websites to ambient, conversational surfaces.

RedBery launched India’s first fully integrated AI concierge platform for lifestyle management, combining 24/7 trip planning, dining, and events with privacy-conscious personalization. At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Mafuwo unveiled its AI Travel Full-Chain Solution, an end-to-end assistant app handling flights, hotels, and on-ground services. Meanwhile, the Colorado Tourism Office partnered with GuideGeek to launch Colorado Concierge, a chat-based AI that delivers itineraries and tips across ski resorts, hikes, and local businesses directly.

As this traveler-side orchestration matures, expect assistants to evolve into anticipatory “control towers” that predict disruptions, re-route logistics, and synchronize identity and payment layers across the journey — effectively transforming the interface of travel itself.

6. Seamless Intermodal & End-to-End Journey Integration

Infrastructure players connect sky, rail, road, and stay into one data layer.

Travel companies have long understood that that journeys cross multiple formats - but they’ve only been able to focus on one part of it. Now, we see a move to help travelers across many aspects of the trip: in the data we saw how airlines, rail networks, and mobility platforms are weaving air, rail, and road travel into single digital itineraries.

Air Canada and Lufthansa now sell joint flight-and-train tickets via Deutsche Bahn, linking 24 German rail destinations through Frankfurt. Additionally, Lufthansa, with Airportr, has expanded door-to-airport baggage collection and digital bag tagging. In the UK, Via and Ticketer are integrating demand-responsive transport with public buses while Amap (Gaode Map) in China launched a rural trip planner that combines planes, trains, and coaches.

Together these efforts transform fragmented legs into one orchestrated, data-driven mobility ecosystem.

III. The Sustainable Infrastructure Shift

From climate compliance to ecosystem building.

7. Decarbonized Operations & Sustainable Infrastructure

Hospitality builds measurable climate action into its core model.

The one thing that I love about hospitality is that they’re powering ahead with sustainability and measurable decarbonization. I guess the investment is major and these projects take time - and so it’s hard for a hotel company to dump their agenda because, say, A politicial climate changes.

In the data, we see how operators are “hard-coding” renewables, circular materials, and low-emission transport into design and procurement. RIU Hotels transitioned all Balearic Islands properties to 100 % locally generated renewable electricity and signed a power-purchase agreement with Iberdrola for five Mexican hotels, adding CHP micro-turbines in Chicago. SWISS and Synhelion pioneered the first solar-fuel aviation pilot converting biowaste into renewable kerosene, targeting commercial rollout by 2027. Far East Hospitality opened two low-carbon hotels in Osaka featuring energy-saving systems and sustainable materials. Electric Dune Buggies Dubai replaced combustion fleets with zero-emission models at Al Badayer Desert

Collectively these projects turn sustainability from a pledge into an operational KPI.

8. Regenerative & Circular Luxury

Luxury evolves from extraction to stewardship.

Regenerative hospitality reframes exclusivity as reciprocity - offering healing ecosystems (to the planet and local community) while elevating the guest experience.

The Meliá Desert Palm Dubai, that we mentioned earlier, centers on low-impact architecture. Sariska Lodge India links conservation and community through organic farming and local employment. Al Zorah Beach Resort Ajman is transforming a coastal site into a Four Seasons-managed, nature-integrated sanctuary (Connecting Travel). Last year, Leela Palaces × Phool upcycled floral waste into incense made by marginalized women, proving circular supply chains can be sensorial and social. Luxury cruise brands Explora Journeys, Scenic Group, and Emerald Cruises integrate emission-reduction tech and waste-management systems across smaller-port itineraries. And finally, platforms like Tinggly channel experiential-gift revenues into community regeneration.

Together these illustrate how luxury can regenerate rather than consume.

9. Nation-Scale Tourism Mega-Projects

Tourism becomes sovereign strategy and urban experiment.

At the macro level, Governments are scaling tourism from destination planning to industrial ecosystem.

Sovereign capital, PPP frameworks, and diversification goals are producing cross-sector “tourism stacks” that merge infrastructure, digital ID, and experience design. Maybe the most well know of these projects is Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, but its found elsewhere: In Oman with Janaen Salalah, and in Sri Lanka with City of Dreams represent this shift—integrating airlines, resorts, and cultural assets into national operating systems. Created by the Omran Group, Janaen Salalah 5.5-million-sq-m project combines agritourism, education, and local retail to diversify the economy.

As these programs embed ESG metrics and visitor analytics, tourism becomes a form of national infrastructure—an industry of industries.

IV. The Cultural & Design Renaissance

Grounding the future of travel in heritage and identity.

10. Historic Revival & Cultural Heritage Hospitality

Adaptive reuse and narrative design anchor meaning in place.

Hospitality brands are restoring historic architecture and reviving design eras to create emotional continuity in fast-modernizing cities. These vintage-modern hybrids balance nostalgia with contemporary comfort, turning restoration into storytelling.

Hotel Ulysses in Baltimore has transformed the 1912 Latrobe Building into a 116-room theatrical retreat, its saturated interiors, bespoke furniture, and art-filled lounges (Ash—Bar and Bloom’s) celebrating early-20th-century glamour. In Catalonia, Transit Studio’s revamp of Le Méridien Ra layers terrazzo and terracotta tones with sea-blue upholstery to reflect regional warmth. India’s The Fern Hotels & Resorts opened Tapovana The Fern Heritage Resort amid Sakleshpur’s coffee plantations—mixing colonial charm with modern amenities and eco-sensitive design. Meanwhile, Portugal’s Grupo Vila Galé expanded with Casas d’Elvas and Collection Ponte de Lima Vineyards, both redeveloping heritage estates into boutique enotourism destinations.

Post-pandemic travelers crave grounded, character-rich stays that contrast with generic global luxury. Heritage reuse not only preserves culture but delivers sustainability through conservation and adaptive design.

Final Takeaway
Across design, operations, and infrastructure, the travel sector is being rebuilt as an intelligent network of spaces, signals, and services. Hotels are programmable platforms; journeys are orchestrated by AI; and culture becomes the medium of differentiation.

The competitive edge is no longer scale but sensitivity — to context, to community, to time. As automation handles logistics, human attention shifts to meaning. The winners in this next phase of travel will be those who design experiences worth the traveler’s most valuable resource: leisure, not labor — time.

Giuseppe’s note about leisure as strategy stayed with me all week. The most forward-thinking hospitality brands already understand that travelers aren’t just buying rooms or routes—they’re investing in how their time feels. Experience is no longer a service layer; it’s the system itself.

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The themes, trends, patterns and ideas in this email were surfaced by PSFK’s trend intelligence system. For over 20 years, PSFK has been known for delivering the best trends research for major corporations.

Piers Fawkes
Founder, PSFK

Earlier this year I ran a beauty report that surfaced themes of memory and play (free download here) , and I was curious to see what our new PSFK Trends Intelligence System would find after ninety days of fresh data. What I found - with the help of the system - is that fragrance is shifting from craft-first to instrumented. Emotion is still the product, but data, computing, and logistics now shape how scent is made, found, and maintained. AI touches the value chain (of course) and in many ways: discovering molecules, optimizing formulas, modelling audiences, and orchestrating sampling, refills, and service flows.

What was opaque is becoming layered: creation informed by generative tools, discovery guided by predictive sampling and spatial interfaces, and retention driven by behavioral signals. Romance doesn’t disappear; it’s designed, measured, and tuned to context — weather, time, place, mood. Science is also moving front-of-pack. Neuroscience claims, ingredient transparency, and safe-synthetic stories are leaving labs and showing up at counters with better verification.

Stores are becoming data-enabled spaces tied to profiles. Samples act like addressable media; refills and pre-orders close the gap between interest and ownership. That power raises the privacy bar: biometric response, skin chemistry, and location triggers can personalize well — if consent, storage standards, and data portability are built in. Distinctiveness also needs protection as similarity engines spread: sensory marks, provenance tech, and licensing that pays for originality.

Here are eight trends that follow show this shift in motion — across provenance and heritage, science and intimacy, retail systems and theatre, everyday extensions and IP-driven storytelling.

- Piers, PSFK

Provenance & Botanical Storytelling in the Attention Economy

Terroir-led narratives and traceable sourcing are redefining niche fragrance as a premium category grounded in authenticity.

In a (super) crowded scent market, independent houses are elevating origin as a key differentiator. By anchoring compositions in specific farms, harvests, and cooperatives, they turn raw materials into stories and justify higher pricing through transparency, specificity, and craft. Provenance gives shoppers a reason to believe, while botanical storytelling transforms ingredients into culture and memory.

Across the niche landscape, terroir and traceability now function as the twin pillars of premiumization. Selvatico, a French heritage label, has built its reputation on natural perfumes that spotlight domestic raw materials and sustainable sourcing. Osmé, launched by Craig and Julia Noik, merges African and Mediterranean botanicals into a line that celebrates traceable regional identity. Meanwhile, Goldfield & Banks continues to position Australian and Kiwi native botanicals—such as amber resins and desert blooms—as markers of place and purity. Even major luxury houses like Gucci, through its Dream Garden pop-up in Nanjing, are transforming botanical narratives into retail theatre, using immersive storytelling to root brand worlds in nature.

The strategy works because it blends scarcity, ethics, and experience. Traceability builds trust, terroir builds uniqueness, and storytelling builds emotional attachment. Together they create a differentiated rationale versus mass fragrance, elevating small-lot botanicals and regenerative sourcing from back-of-house practice to front-of-pack theatre. The global fragrance market is projected to exceed $52.4 billion by 2025, with sustainability-led and provenance-driven brands driving much of that growth—a signal that consumers now associate place with value.

Looking ahead, expect clearer ingredient passports, micro-lot releases that reflect seasonality, and in-store education mapping each note back to its geography (like a wine store, maybe). As transparency becomes table stakes, brands that connect noses to nature through verifiable origin stories will command both attention and margin.

Heritage, Cultural Revivals & Brand Longevity

Fragrance houses are mining archives and staging multisensory exhibitions to position scent as both cultural heritage and living art.

While niche brands might be exploring the provenance of ingredients, legacy brands are rediscovering their roots and reframing them for a contemporary audience. Archival reissues, origin-storytelling, and museum-style curation are turning perfume from a consumable into a collectible — a vessel for memory, artistry, and brand mythology. These activations elevate fragrance beyond the counter, situating it in galleries, films, and anniversary retrospectives that invite audiences to see scent as culture.

The movement spans both luxury houses and experimental ateliers. Balenciaga has revived its fragrance line with Heritage and Exclusive collections that reinterpret its archival compositions, pairing them with campaigns exploring the brand’s lineage in fashion and scent. Designed by Oma, Dior’s “Stories of a Miss” exhibition in Shanghai merged couture, archives, and technology into a multisensory art installation that positioned fragrance as a narrative medium. Meanwhile, New York’s Olfactory Art Keller presented Her Scent of Mystery, a recreation of a 1961 perfume tied to Hollywood’s golden age, demonstrating how reissued formulas can bridge cinema, memory, and olfactory craft. Houbigant Paris, marking its 250th anniversary, launched sustainability-upgraded reissues in collaboration with Perris Monte Carlo—proof that heritage storytelling can modernize as much as memorialize.

The wider revival is also lifting historic names like D’Orsay, Santa Maria Novella, and Creed, as collectors and younger consumers alike rediscover the allure of provenance and craftsmanship. Strategically, this turn toward heritage monetizes existing IP, lowers development risk, and deepens brand equity. Exhibitions, reissues, and archival storytelling extend dwell time and attract museum and tourism partners, while provenance cues naturally support refill, authentication, and circular-economy models.

Writing for Glossy recently, beauty editor Emily Jensen argues:

“Those longstanding names stand in contrast to a stream of new perfume brands like Dedcool, Kayali and Snif, which have found success by tapping into contemporary scent profiles and formats like gourmands and body mists. But while they may not be as zeitgeisty as 21st-century made brands, an existing brand can give founders a head start in developing a compelling story.”

The opportunity for these brands seems to lie in leverageing this cultural capital. Could we see digital item passports for authenticated reissues, touring museum partnerships that travel through retail and galleries, and membership-style collector programs that merge patronage with loyalty? As the global fragrance market heads toward $78 billion by 2032, legacy is becoming a growth engine—transforming brand memory into both trust and traction.

Science-Led Fragrance & Responsive Beauty

Neuroscience, transparency, and personalization are transforming perfumery from an intuitive craft into a measurable sensory discipline.

Fragrance is entering its evidence era. As beauty consumers demand proof, provenance, and personalization, perfumers are turning to technology to quantify emotion, decode chemistry, and validate claims. The result is a category recoded around neuro-beauty, data transparency, and adaptive design—where artistry meets analytics.

Leading this shift, Givaudan’s NeuroLab GB measures brain and biometric responses to scent in real time, using data such as electrical impulses, heart-rate variation, and pupil dilation to understand how olfactory stimuli map to mood. The lab’s research powers platforms like MoodScentz and VivaScentz, which connect fragrance accords to measurable well-being outcomes. Similarly, the O Boticário Group applies neuroscience to its Egeo line: Egeo E.joy uses taurine and ginseng to trigger “Joy Effect” stimulation, while Egeo Choc High blends chocolate and strawberry notes to evoke pleasure through neuroactive ingredients. Gemology Paris extends the science into skin care with neuro-cosmetics that merge touch and scent to moderate stress and improve comfort.

Customization is evolving alongside research. S.S.K. Labs in New York launched data-driven, user-tuned perfumes that adapt compositions through scent-mapping algorithms. Experimental house Candy Bulsara built The Ballet Collection from motion-capture studies that translate dance movement into aromatic form. In Japan, Scentfest’s “Poupon Pure”—a perfume replicating the scent of newborn skin—sold out instantly, showing how emotional recall can be engineered as a product experience.

In her recent email newsletter, beauty industry consultant Colleen Quinn considers the impact of science on beauty:

“The beauty industry has long been a marketplace of hope. For decades, promising claimed radiance, youthfulness, repair, or shine, often substantiated by little more than consumer anecdotes or perception surveys. Yet today, we stand at an inflection point: Discerning consumers, data-driven investors, and ambitious founders now demand more than glossy claims. They want proof. With the competitive race for true innovation truly underway the question is: Does this sought-after proof exist?”

Transparency will not doubt be needed to reinforce credibility. From full ingredient disclosures pioneered by Henry Rose to Europe’s new mandate requiring 56 allergens on labels, regulation and expectation are converging. The digital scent-technology market is forecast to reach $1.3 billion by 2032, as tools like AI formulators, biosignal interfaces, and smart-cap sensors turn fragrance into a responsive system that learns from its wearer.

In the next few years, we might see skin-chemistry mapping, microbiome-aware bases, and wearable-linked personalization to turn perfumery into a live feedback loop. Open-formula ledgers and refillable smart bottles will close the transparency gap and add diagnostic value to beauty routines.

Pleasure, Sexual Wellness & Personal Confidence

Beauty brands are reframing sensuality as self-care, using scent and texture-driven products to normalize intimacy within daily routines.

I guess scent and sex have always been playmates but the data in the trends intelligence system revealed how pleasure and sexual wellness are slipping out from underneath the sheets and are seriously showing up full frontal in the fragrance and personal-care aisle. The latest launches show products explicitly designed and marketed around sensual pleasure, touch, and intimacy - positioning these experiences as part of holistic wellbeing rather than taboo. By pairing multi-sensory cues such as aroma, glide, warmth, and after-feel with inclusive, consent-focused language, brands are transforming intimacy into a conversation about confidence, comfort, and self-knowledge.

Several case studies illustrate this shift. O Boticário introduced Her Code Clímax, a fine-fragrance blend that celebrates women’s pleasure and body confidence, using scent as a tool for empowerment. Promescent’s Go Solo Self-Play Lotion reframes self-touch through a texture-first design that markets “luxury for solo wellness.” In the U.S., LoveShackFancy’s collaboration with Tinder connected dating culture and fragrance through Secret Garden pop-ups, while Amorecco’s Late Night Gelato perfume blurred the line between intimacy and indulgence with a lickable gourmand formula. Even boundary-pushing labels such as Boy Smells continue to reimagine desire with Citrush, a poppers-inspired scent that celebrates queer pleasure aesthetics.

The business logic tracks wider beauty behavior. As self-care routines fragment into micro-moments, sensorial formats that deliver instant mood and body benefits gain traction. Retailers can cross-merchandise these SKUs with bath, sleep, and stress-relief solutions to drive basket expansion, while content strategies emphasize safety, skin compatibility, and transparent usage guidance. The global sexual-wellness market is projected to reach $125 billion by 2032, with the U.S. segment alone expected to rise to $27 billion, signaling broad investor interest and mainstream normalization.

Looking ahead, personalization may move from skin type to mood state, with scent and texture pairings tailored to context. Sampling and education will be critical levers—from in-store discovery zones to privacy-first subscriptions that help shoppers explore and build confidence at home.

Fragrance Retail: Discovery, Refill & Pre-Order Convenience

Sampler-to-full-size, refill-on-the-spot, and pre-order pickup are reshaping fragrance retail into a low-friction loop that lifts trial, speeds replenishment, and grows lifetime value.

Fragrance is shifting from one-off gifting to an ongoing service relationship. The new retail playbook centers on three connected conveniences: discovery through structured sampling systems, in-store refill fountains that reduce packaging waste, and pre-order pickup models that capture intent before it fades. Together, these formats streamline the journey from curiosity to commitment—turning exploration into habit.

Across recent launches, innovation in convenience has become the differentiator. Balenciaga’s Discovery Box invites customers to sample portable mini formats before committing to a full-size bottle, gamifying exploration while minimizing returns. L’Oréal Luxe has installed refill fountains for YSL Beauté, Mugler, and Lancôme, bringing circularity to the counter and reinforcing loyalty through sustainability and savings. Meanwhile, ScentAir’s Build Your Own Sample Pack lets shoppers curate scents and earn credits toward future purchases, a model that personalizes discovery while generating high-intent data. ARRAN Sense of Scotland’s refillable festive collection proves that gifting and eco-design can coexist, while Portugal Duty Free has added pre-order pickup and travel-exclusive refills to streamline replenishment for travelers.

Operationally, the discovery-to-refill loop boosts efficiency and repeat engagement. Sampling drives qualified leads; refills raise visit frequency at a lower cost per milliliter; and pre-order pickup improves inventory flow by locking in demand at peak interest. These formats also align with sustainability mandates, reducing single-use packaging and enabling traceability through refill tracking and digital item passports.

The category is evolving toward interoperability and intelligence. Considering the breadth of brands sold by a handful of fragrance houses, could we see standardized refill fittings across brands, predictive replenishment prompts timed to individual usage, and same-day locker integrations that make replenishment as simple as an app notification? Retailers would merge consultation and convenience—embedding fragrance profiling, sampling subscriptions, and appointment-based refills into a single seamless ecosystem.

Immersive & Experiential Fragrance Retail and Brand Storytelling

Pop-ups, destination stores, and late-night drops are emerging as high-impact discovery funnels that merge storytelling, sampling, and social reach into a single, sensory experience.

Fragrance is uniquely suited to theatre. From projection-mapped pop-ups to multisensory galleries, brands are designing activations that choreograph emotion through scent, sound, and light. These spaces compress awareness, trial, and purchase into a single encounter, turning curiosity into conversion and launches into cultural moments.

Recent case studies show the scope and scale of this shift. Gucci’s Dream Garden pop-up in Nanjing reimagined the store as an immersive botanical universe, combining scent diffusion and digital art to dramatize its fragrance portfolio. Marc Jacobs’ Daisy Wild sensory pop-up in London invited guests into a dreamlike installation of florals, soundscapes, and projection mapping, proving that late-night drops can double as social media events. Elsewhere in London, Dior constructed a fortress-like space to relaunch Sauvage through cinematic VR experiences and personalized sampling rituals, while Christian Louboutin Beauty’s Salon de Parfum staged red-hued sensory chambers where visitors could collect limited editions. Prada’s Paradigme Men’s debut leaned into nightlife culture, with projection mapping and DJ residencies that turned a fragrance launch into a social happening. Even retailers like Boots are entering the arena, with a new fragrance-only store in London designed around sampling zones, refill integrations, and event-driven merchandising.

The model is proving measurable. Pop-up activations can deliver two to three times higher trial-to-purchase conversion than static counters, fueled by longer dwell times and user-generated amplification. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha prioritize experience over ownership, these activations give brands direct storytelling control and an organic content engine that extends reach without relying on paid media.

The trend extends beyond fragrance: Frédéric Malle’s Manhattan flagship and Rituals’ Lisbon store now stage scent as part of holistic wellbeing, while MAC’s piano-themed flagship demonstrates how performance-driven retail is reshaping beauty at large. Writing in a the Substack newsletter , the industry expert authors discussed the broader impact of fragrance across retail:

”Just as grocers have turned private labels into cult favorites — think Trader Joe’s seasonal drops or Whole Foods 365’s halo of “better-for-you” credibility, fashion retailers are now making a similar play in fragrance and beauty. The strategy is no longer about filling shelves with cheaper alternatives. Instead, private-label beauty has evolved into a design-led, loyalty-building engine that stands as a credible alternative to prestige brands, while creating new reasons for consumers to shop across categories.”

Looking ahead, maybe we could imagine touring scent shows that rotate through nightlife venues and airports, permanent micro-theatres within flagships, and digital layers—QR-linked AR try-ons, data-rich sampler codes, and refill credits—that connect real-world events to ongoing loyalty programs.

Embedded Scented Experiences & Ecosystems of Moments

Fragrance is expanding far beyond the bottle. From wearables and spirits to hotel keys and edible collaborations, brands are embedding scent into everyday objects and experiences to create multisensory touchpoints that extend reach and deepen loyalty.

The category’s new frontier lies in making scent repeatable and ambient—something worn, shared, or lived with rather than merely applied. As competition intensifies and consumers seek new emotional and physical connections with brands, fragrance houses are exploring accessories, travel retail, and cross-industry collaborations that transform aroma into ongoing ritual.

Recent launches highlight the creative scope. Ôrəbella’s partnership with Wildflower Cases turns phone accessories into miniature scent diffusers, positioning fragrance as a wearable expression of mood and identity. Jo Malone’s Jo Vodka extends the brand into hospitality and mixology, translating fragrance accords into a luxury spirits line that fuses aroma, flavor, and lifestyle. Aftelier’s Biblioscents bookmarks bring scent to literature, blending olfactory storytelling with the tactile intimacy of reading. Meanwhile, Prose’s collaboration with Funny Face Bakery transforms a signature perfume note into edible cookies—a playful intersection of beauty, flavor, and nostalgia. Even hospitality players are joining in: GCS Times’ carbon-neutral wooden hotel key cards infuse rooms with subtle fragrance, combining sustainability, design, and sensory branding in a single gesture.

The opportunity is twofold. These activations create low-capex distribution moments—through travel retail, collectible accessories, and co-branded products—while building a brand world that consumers can carry or gift. Scent becomes an always-on interface, capable of bridging digital and physical worlds through ambient diffusion, refillable formats, and even subscription-based “scent playlists.”

Market data underscores the momentum. The global home fragrance market is forecast to reach 44.77 billion by 2034. As scent permeates new categories—from hospitality and spirits to fashion tech—fragrance is evolving into a platform rather than a product.

Looking ahead, expect programmable wearables, refillable accessories, and vehicle or hotel-based scent partnerships to scale this behavior. Brands will treat scent as media, crafting serialized experiences that shift with context and mood.

Fragrance IP - the new signature of fandom

Fragrance becomes a storytelling platform—expanding through entertainment, character IP, and cultural collaborations that turn scent into a collectible narrative medium.

Fragrance is becoming the new frontier of licensed storytelling. Once confined to fashion spin-offs, scent now provides brands with emotional IP—an expressive format that allows fans to smell their favorite characters, stories, and cultural worlds.

Recent collaborations illustrate how entertainment and beauty are fusing. Scentbird’s partnership with Sony Pictures for “I Know What You Did Last Summer” delivered a discovery set tied to the film’s sequel, promoted through a New York screening where scents diffused during key scenes. Xyrena’s deal with Universal Products & Experiences debuted with a Jaws 50th Anniversary perfume, packaged in VHS-style boxes and featuring oceanic notes inspired by the film’s setting—a tactile blend of nostalgia and novelty.

Pop culture IP is also energizing beauty retail. Boy Smells’ collaboration with Bratz launched Doll Skin, a Y2K-inspired body mist that merges Gen Z fashion nostalgia with fragrance storytelling. Squishmallows’ national rollout at Ulta Beauty brought character-driven scents to a younger demo, while Bath & Body Works’ Disney Villains collection leverages seasonal fandom to refresh its Halloween lineup. Lifestyle and home categories are joining in too: Houseplant’s collaboration with Ripple+ Home has turned Seth Rogen’s cannabis aesthetic into scented home droplets, blending humor and sophistication.

IP extensions deliver instant recognition, social shareability, and collectible value—without the costs of new brand creation. Licensing experts forecast double-digit growth in scent-based partnerships through 2026, with the global licensing economy estimated to be a $165.5 billion industry. For entertainment and beauty alike, fragrance has become a sensory vehicle for storytelling equity.

Looking ahead, could brands experiment with episodic scent drops, streaming-linked launches, and fan memberships that unlock refill or remix options tied to new seasons, films, and artists? As scent collides with culture, fragrance becomes not just a product—but a platform for serialized storytelling and emotional ownership.

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The themes, trends, patterns and ideas in this email were surfaced by PSFK’s trend intelligence system.

Piers Fawkes
Founder, PSFK

Warning - you need to dedicate a few minutes to this - it’s long and and weighty - but I hope this inspires you no matter what sector you work in.

The Trends Proving Retail’s IRL Resilience

Six signals showing how stores are fighting back—with services, premiumization, and new formats.

OK. so let’s start with an obvious statement: over the last few years, there have been plenty of questions about the role of the store in today’s ecommerce world. Walk down almost any main street and you’ll see the evidence: empty storefronts, spaces converted into physical therapy clinics, or bike repair shops serving gig delivery riders.

Real-world retail has a formidable and sophisticated opponent. When we think about online shopping, we often imagine a traditional ecommerce site—or maybe an influencer selling through a platform—but digital commerce is much more advanced than that. It doesn’t wait for you to log on and scroll in the right direction; it comes to you, shaping offers and sales in context.

When I recently ran a report on PSFK’s trend intelligence system, one emerging theme jumped out: Geo-Triggered Commerce Enabled by Marketplaces and Rapid Logistics. In essence, it’s the ability to buy anything you never knew you wanted the moment you realize you’d like it.

Of course, physical retail is carving out its own role in this landscape. Stores are moving closer to the shopper, often in smaller formats designed to micro-target communities. Inside, technology is embraced to create smarter experiences—fast-turnaround services, bespoke formats, and merchandising that features hard-to-replicate categories like vintage.

In this newsletter, I’ll share some of the themes I’m tracking through PSFK’s advanced trends intelligence system—a tool built on 20 years of PSFK’s experience and expertise, designed to constantly monitor the weak signals of new ideas.

Trouble in Store: Just-in-Time Retail

Digital commerce keeps tightening the loop between discovery and delivery, making speed and context the new default expectations.

In the same way the CD replaced vinyl, ecommerce replaced the store. It solved for access, supply, and availability—but along the way we lost some of the analog rituals. People love vinyl because it’s a focused experience and a ceremony: you place the gem on a kind of altar and say to your friends, “listen to this.” Stores can be gems, too—and they can be smarter. Like music now crackling through the house via Bluetooth, stores can engage shoppers with the speed and sophistication they expect from digital retailing.

But ‘just in time’ retail doesn’t stand still. It has long stopped trying to replicate the retail store experience; it now focuses on selling more and more and more. A major theme that we found using PSFK’s trends intelligence system was Geo-Triggered Commerce Enabled by Marketplaces and Rapid Logistics. Here, marketplaces, real-time discovery tools, and rapid last-mile logistics integrate to trigger offers and fulfillment when phones signal that consumers are in a certain location—enabling near-instant pickup or delivery and shortening the path from discovery to purchase.

The steps from discovery to delivery are consolidating. The location-based marketing landscape is projected to reach $69.0 billion in 2025, growing at ~15%. Maps, alerts, creator content, and two-hour logistics now interlock so shoppers can see, want, and receive locally—without channel hops.

Offers become context-aware—concert merch near venues, travel kits along airport routes, and “shop the commute” suggestions tied to train arrivals—with two-hour delivery as default. Memob reports that businesses leveraging customer geography outperform competitors by an average of 41%. Industry observers argue that geofencing is a major driver as integration with AI, analytics, and IoT expands use cases across retail and beyond.

Mobility platforms, hotels, and event operators plug into local carts to reserve and stage nearby stock before arrival. Predictive staging for big days, autonomous curb handoffs, green-routing signals, voice purchases via car infotainment, and consolidated returns pickups all operate on the same proximity rails.

Chinese tech platforms highlight this evolution. Alibaba is relaunching Koubei and tying it into Amap, embedding service discovery directly into navigation. Tencent’s GAIA platform takes a predictive tack, using spatiotemporal AI to forecast needs and stage supply in advance. Together, these moves illustrate how geo-triggered commerce is shifting from reactive offers to proactive ecosystems that anticipate demand.

The trend isn’t limited to Asia. In Lisbon, Flair partners with sustainable fashion brands to offer two-hour delivery of apparel and accessories, extending instant-commerce beyond food and essentials. In the U.S., Home Depot’s Orange Apron Media is testing location-aware ad tools that help suppliers reach customers at the right place and time—linking campaigns more directly to sales outcomes.

So…

How are retailers responding to the ever-evolving digital threat? Some are experimenting with futuristic automation to compete head-on with ecommerce. For example - in Milan, Lululemon’s new flagship blends architecture and tech, with a 3D-printed façade and Endless Aisle systems that promise seamless access to inventory.

But the question still remains: is this really what shoppers are looking for? Lululemon might showcase retail’s ability to go toe-to-toe with ecommerce on efficiency and technology, but they risk missing the deeper draw of physical retail. The more compelling opportunity may be to provide the analog to digital—to offer vinyl rather than CD. Pulling from the examples our system has surfaced over the past 90 days, we’re seeing a growing emphasis on experiences and services that simply don’t make sense in digital form.

Let’s take a look through these:

Service-First Retail Stores as Local Community Hubs

By prioritizing services and community ties, stores turn routine errands into repeatable rituals that digital alone can’t replicate.

One key way that retailers are responding to the ever-evolving digital threat is by doubling down on services—repairs, clinics, click-and-collect, specialist consultations—and by programming locally to drive habitual visits, lift lifetime value, and shift stores from pure sales points to ongoing service centers.

With product margins under pressure and online channels commoditizing selection, physical stores compete on services that create repeatable, habit-forming visits and local affinity. Nordstrom Local’s new Williamsburg hub compresses high-frequency errands—pickup, returns, alterations, gift wrap, even donations for Housing Works—into a trip-efficient 3,000-sq-ft format. 1001 Optometry elevates care with semi-private consult rooms that balance openness and privacy, making clinic time feel premium. Community markets like Mercato Metropolitano in London curate independent vendors, dining, and workshops so the venue itself becomes a ritual destination. In Shenzhen, the 6S Store curates robot brands together.

Category specialists also add culture and cadence: MAAP LaB in LA’s Venice Beach pairs a coffee bar with weekly rides, product drops, and events; LEGO’s expanded Cardiff store in the UK layers hands-on build challenges, a Pick-a-Brick wall, and staff guidance—play as service families return to. And here’s an example from a smaller market: Highland Creative Supply in Butte, Montana fills a local arts-supply gap, plans a makers’ space with pro classes, and runs an “orphaned” supply corner whose donations support a children’s theater—service as reciprocity.

Even legacy specialists are adopting the model. The Perfume Shop’s experiential refit in the UK’s Burnley adds personalized ribbon machines, complimentary gift wrap, and fragrance consultations, while incentivizing loyalty through a recycling program that rewards customers for returning bottles. Sustainability measures like LED lighting round out the service proposition, turning a straightforward store into a relationship-driven hub.

These formats monetize time saved, trust, and belonging—and they benefit from return flows, appointment density, and partnerships with local institutions that convert footfall into loyalty. A recent industry survey underscores the mood: 94% of community-based retailers report being in good or excellent shape.

Premium in Grocery Gives a Reason to Shop

​​Grocers show that premiumization—through theatre, chef partnerships, and meal solutions—can transform everyday shopping into a reason to visit.

If traditional retailers are searching for inspiration and ideas for growth, they might look to the grocery aisle. Grocers have been under relentless pressure from delivery platforms, but instead of competing purely on speed, some are reframing the store as a premium food destination. The formula: chef partnerships, higher-quality ready-to-eat meals, and elevated private-label offerings that pull shoppers back in—and capture higher-margin foodservice revenue.

Consumers are trading up on convenience, demanding fresh, chef-adjacent quality without the sit-down friction of restaurants. Retailers are responding with concepts that merge discovery, theatre, and daily practicality. In South Africa, Woolworths’ new Durbanville Food Emporium showcases this strategy with luxury counters, live cooking demos, an expanded fishmonger, artisanal bakery, and curated wine pantry—while also introducing eco-conscious design and recyclable packaging. In Korea, convenience leaders like GS25, CU, and Emart24 are refreshing menus at a rapid cadence, from low-sugar HMR noodles to chef collaborations like freshwater eel rice bowls, sustaining habitual visits and driving refill velocity.

In the U.S., Walmart is scaling healthier staples with Jams’ upgraded PB&J sandwiches, backed by athletes Alex Morgan and C.J. Stroud, now in 3,000 stores. Positioned as a healthier alternative to Smucker’s Uncrustables, the product demonstrates how grocers can premiumize even the most everyday categories. New entrants are also anchoring local markets: Midwest Premium Kosher opened in downtown South Bend, Indiana, pairing fresh produce, meat, and bakery goods with neighborhood revitalization—showing how premium grocery can double as civic infrastructure.

The momentum in premium grocery is backed by macro signals: Circana projects value, private-label, and premium food & beverage brands will all expand in 2025, driven by price and mix gains. Meanwhile, the global prepared food market is valued at $186.7 billion (2024) and set to grow nearly 10% annually through 2035, underscoring how prepared and premiumized grocery is a long-term growth engine.

From provenance QR codes on private label to “kitchen-as-a-service” bays for rapid regional trials, grocery is proving that premiumization isn’t just about product—it’s about transforming the store into a stage for fresh, evolving, and habit-forming experiences.

Retail-Integrated Resale and Curated Pre-Owned Assortments

Resale is moving from side channel to center-aisle retail strategy, with infrastructure and curation making second-hand as trusted as new.

Resale is no longer a sideline for many retailers —it’s becoming a foundational retail strategy. Retailers are adopting standardized refurbishment, grading, and quality-control processes so pre-owned inventory can sit confidently alongside new products, expanding access for value-seeking and sustainability-minded shoppers.

Inflationary pressure and circular preferences are colliding with institutional scale. Local operators like Love Me Again in Bar Harbor, Maine and The Bin Store Snellville in Georgia move overstock and returns quickly, pairing weekly refreshes with donation flows. Platforms are normalizing secondhand discovery: Pinterest’s Thrift Shop runs weekly vintage drops in partnership with global resellers, while eBay’s Endless Runway has staged pre-loved collections at New York and London Fashion Week with shoppable streams, turning circular fashion into high-profile culture.

The market signals are unmistakable. Deloitte has found that 153 U.S. fashion brands now list resale directly on their e-commerce sites—a 325% increase since 2021. Online resale grew 23% in 2024, the fastest-growing segment in secondhand. The U.S. resale market is projected to hit $59 billion in 2025 and $73 billion by 2028. Globally, the apparel resale category is on track to surpass $356 billion by 2029.

Incumbents are formalizing trade-in, refurbishment, and warranties to protect trust and margins. Certified pre-owned now sits beside new products with on-site repairs, cleaning, and tailoring. Trade-in at checkout is becoming routine across categories, with insurers, lenders, and logistics providers formalizing buybacks and reverse flows. Creators add storytelling that boosts perceived value, fueling a flywheel of low-cost inventory, high content velocity, and loyalty via trade-up loops.

The next phase is infrastructure: universal grading standards, digital item passports, and cross-retailer trade-up credits. Micro-upcycling studios embedded on store floors and emerging parts marketplaces will allow inventory to be fixed or customized on demand. For shoppers, resale is becoming trusted, curated, and frictionless. For retailers, it’s becoming a growth engine that integrates seamlessly into the everyday assortment.

Short-Run Co-Branded Pop-Up Retail Installations

Pop-ups are evolving into campaign stages—short bursts of culture and commerce that convert attention into acquisition.

While not necessarily a new idea, brands and retail partners are leaning into temporary, co-branded pop-ups to launch limited drops and curated experiences that drive immediate foot traffic, email and social capture, and PR buzz. These spaces act less like stores and more like campaign stages—short-term marketing bursts designed for customer acquisition and cultural relevance rather than long-term inventory display.

Rising paid-media costs and digital signal loss are pushing brands to seek owned, high-impact IRL moments that double as content studios. The focus is on time-boxed activations in high-footfall corridors and tourist hubs, where immersion, co-creation, and shareability transform brand awareness into measurable capture.

@selfridgesCome and explore the new @FARM Rio pop-up at #SelfridgesLondon! #ss25 #summerstyle

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Recent activations highlight the playbook: Barbour x FARM Rio’s Carnaby Street takeover blended British heritage with Brazilian vibrancy, turning a London flagship into a lush tropical escape. Elsewhere in the UK capital, FARM Rio partnered with Estúdio Campana at Selfridges to build a living forest installation, merging fashion, nature, and art into a cultural spectacle. In Korea, yummy food maker Benson teamed with Starbucks at Starfield Suwon for a pop-up that paired new ice cream flavors with café culture, illustrating how F&B crossovers drive trial and social buzz.

Alongside these partnerships, landlords and brands are experimenting with cultural formats that amplify pop-up theatre. IKEA’s Billyothèque transformed Paris’s Seine into an open-air reading room, while Marc Jacobs’ Daisy Wild sensory installation in Covent Garden showed how single-brand pop-ups can blur art, retail, and experience. Even tech entrants are joining: Perplexity’s Café Curious in Seoul combines coffee with hands-on demos of its AI platform, a hybrid of hospitality and product trial. Together, these moves underscore a $80B short-term retail sector projected to surpass $95B by 2025, where temporary activations are both acquisition tools and cultural capital.

Looking ahead, pop-ups are evolving into touring residencies that rotate through malls, airports, and museums via plug-and-play kits, performance-based rent, and shared CRM. Booking platforms will manage activation calendars; collectible keepsakes are emerging as a standard measurement mechanic; reusable set designs will be rented like event gear; and pre-order-to-pickup models will turn visits into guaranteed sales. City zoning for “activation corridors” may soon connect tourism marketing, ticketing, and hospitality partnerships directly to these installations.

Retail’s Resilience: Targeted Store Expansion and Format Pilots

Scale and spectacle are converging: efficient footprints at one end, destination flagships at the other, both proving that IRL retail is back.

If you want evidence that there’s real belief in physical retail, look at the wave of well-funded operators accelerating store openings and piloting new formats. From flagship destinations to takeout-only footprints, these moves secure local catchment, control brand discovery, and position stores as both marketing surfaces and fulfillment hubs.

As ecommerce growth levels out, discovery is shifting toward experiences and local availability. To capture this, capitalized players are locking in prime real estate and using stores as demand funnels. Avenue Supermarts (DMart) plans 50 new stores in northern India while upgrading its DMart Ready service for three-to-six-hour delivery—proof that expansion and fulfillment now move in lockstep. In Ireland, IKEA’s new Waterford location—its largest outside Dublin—anchors regional presence. In Cairo, Huawei’s first Experience Store layers installment perks and exclusive bundles on top of its full product ecosystem. In the U.S., J.Crew’s Summer Club in Nantucket reflects a lifestyle-driven model where seasonal pop-ups and local collaborations deepen brand connection.

Luxury and specialty players are raising the bar for experiential formats. RH Paris on the Champs-Élysées fuses retail and hospitality with restaurants, a hidden garden, and a design bibliotheca, positioning the flagship as a cultural landmark. In Singapore, Pierre Hermé Paris has opened its largest store globally at Resorts World Sentosa—a two-story destination with a macaron counter, ice cream bar, café, furoshiki wrapping station, and full-service restaurant—transforming a pâtisserie into a cultural and culinary attraction. In Hangzhou, % Arabica’s MixC store turns coffee retail into architectural theatre, with a rotating Chemex façade and tunnel interiors designed for social sharing.

The expansion playbook is evolving. With leaner inventories, stores operate as stock-light showrooms supported by same-day delivery, visible micro-warehouses, and takeout-first footprints in high-traffic nodes. Many sell programming alongside product and run as dark nodes after hours. Modular “store-in-a-box” construction, co-tenancy alliances, drone and locker pickups, and seasonal swaps at the neighborhood scale are rounding out the toolkit.

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So where does this leave us:

Whether it’s resale, collaboration, hyper-service or premiumization, Together, these moves signal that retail is not retreating in the face of ecommerce but doubling down—scaling breadth with efficient new formats and raising depth with destination flagships that merge culture, hospitality, and commerce. Physical retail isn’t just back; it’s becoming the front line of brand experience.

Thank you for reading,

Piers, PSFK

Since the beginning of 2025, I’ve been running a series of experiments by researching and publishing trend reports that compare my own process (let’s call it the human/PSFK approach) with what you get when you put AI to work on the same data. The result? What I found was a a definite “nuance gap”between my work and the machine (more on nuance gaps in this article here). More interestingly, it’s got me thinking deeply about two things:

• How do human researchers really create value in an AI-driven world?

• How do we design better, more systematic, and genuinely creative AI trends systems—to get to new ideas and insights faster, and at scale?

Below, I’ll share a peek behind the scenes of the system I’m building for tech firms like WALDO - one that blends the best of both worlds and my latest thinking on what it means for anyone working in trends, foresight, or innovation.

Comment on the topics in this newsletter on the LinkedIn version

Beyond Headlines: How Modern Trend Research Actually Works

Let’s clear up a misconception right away: Automated trend research isn’t just “AI search + spreadsheet.” The reality - at least in my workflow - is much more layered, with a clear split between data gathering and analysis, and multiple rounds of prompt engineering, tagging, and editorial QA.

Step 1: Building a Living Database of Signals

The backbone of my system isn’t a Google search. It’s a living, constantly updated database of early signals: launches, pilots, partnerships, patents, product drops, and company moves. I use Airtable for this but other trends leaders like Dan Gould use Notion.

• The signals come from hundreds of sources—RSS feeds, curated newsletters, web scrapers, social APIs, market databases, and direct submissions.

• Both automated agents and human researchers are involved: tagging, categorizing, and filtering each new entry to make sure we’re capturing what’s emerging, not just what’s loudest or most recent.

• Every signal is tagged by industry, sector, tech, company type, and often by customer journey, audience, or innovation theme. I want to make it easier to take a slice of data based on category to help focus an LLMs work at a later stage.

Step 2: Prompts & Process - Data Gathering & Trends Analysis

This is where the system gets pretty, pretty powerful. There are really two sets of prompt workflows:

• A. Data Gathering Prompts: These are designed to scan, filter, tag, and structure raw inputs as they come in. They surface the “weak signals” that might later become trends: Which launches, pilots, or pivots are truly new? Are we missing signals in a fast-moving sector? Is this an actual case study or just another PR puff piece?

• B. Trends Analysis Prompts: This is where the magic (and the risk) happens.

Between the Two: Tagging, Rewriting, & Feedback Loops

The flow isn’t just linear. Tagging and recategorization happens as data moves through the system. If a signal starts as “food tech” and gets reclassified as “AI in food service” or “hyper-local retail,” that’s intentional. Feedback from the analysis side can inform what to look for in the next round of data gathering.

What AI Still Gets Wrong (Unless You Fix It)

Here’s what I’ve seen repeatedly:

• AI over-filters or under-filters. If you don’t instruct it, it either floods your database with hype (“AI revolutionizes everything!”) or misses the weak signals entirely.

• AI loves “trend inflation.” Give it enough data, and it will cluster by the shallowest pattern (shared keyword, surface similarity). Result: reports full of “Sustainability,” “AI,” “Experience Economy”—with little substance.

• Context and “why now” go missing. Without clear prompt logic, LLMs skip the hard work of asking, What’s new about this? Why here, why now, why this way? That’s where human researchers shine—and where prompt design needs to evolve.

• Naming is lazy unless forced. “Digital Renaissance,” “Frontiers of Wellness,” “Luxury Reimagined.” These sound big but mean little. If you want titles that mean something to an executive, you need to ban metaphor and demand specificity.

Typically, I just use a human (me) to edit mistakes but I appreciate the challenge that Justin Wohlstadter has given me for my work with WALDO which is to build prompts and processes that really do fix them.

What Human Researchers Must Do Differently—And How to Build Better Trend Systems

1. Obsess about your sources, and tag everything. If you want to build an AI system that’s more than a headline chaser, start with a database that’s broad, deep, and carefully tagged for future pattern recognition. Treat every new signal as a possible 'trend brick'—not a finished idea. (Ooh, I like trend brick - the LLM editing this piece came up with that term, not me).

2. Separate the data gathering and analysis pipelines. Build one set of prompts, agents, and QA for surfacing, filtering, and tagging weak signals. Build another for clustering, contextualizing, and narrating trends. Don’t conflate the two.

3. Ban lazy clustering and buzzword naming. Set rules that require trends to be supported by multiple, diverse, recent signals—and to be named in a way that would make sense as a board report chapter, not a marketing conference keynote.

4. Build in editorial and agentic feedback. Allow your system to re-tag, re-classify, and surface outliers. Create feedback loops so new signals can reshape trend clusters over time.

5. Always allow for the “standalone weak signal.” If your system tries to force every signal into a trend, you’ll miss the real edge. Allow for “not yet a trend, but worth watching.”

6. QA for value at every step. Use a human editor or a final AI pass to strip out metaphor, generic hype, and vague “trend language.” Demand clarity, evidence, and a real story.

Why It Matters

I’m convinced that the future of trends work isn’t human vs. machine, but human with machine—provided we architect our systems for nuance, context, and defensibility. When clients or stakeholders ask “Why is this a trend?” you can point to the signals, the examples, the context, and the narrative—not just the volume of headlines.

If you’re only using LLMs to summarize a Google folder of trend reports, for example, you’ll get what everyone else gets. If you invest in a real system—one that values tagging, QA, multi-stage prompts, and editorial feedback—you’ll actually see (and act on) what’s coming next.

If you’d like to know more about the AI trends systems I’m building - or an introduction to Waldo - drop me a line - piers@psfk.com

Comment on the topics in this newsletter on the LinkedIn version

We seem to be entering a new phase in the history of the web. A period where the first point of contact won’t be a search engine or a website—it’ll be a single (and victorious) LLM. Over time, our use of traditional search, apps, and websites will likely significantly drop. Instead, this front-line interface will act on the user's behalf, calling on services like Amazon, Expedia, and Google Claude (!) —delivering results without the user ever leaving the chat.

[Discuss the topic of this newsletter on LinkedIn]

The Singular Interface Experience (SIE)

I'm calling this the Singular Interface Experience (SIE). It’s not a future scenario—it’s happening now. While most people are still accessing services through browsers, that’s quickly changing. AI agents are starting to handle those interactions instead. They don’t visit your homepage. They don’t care how slick your navigation is. They go straight to your systems and ask:

Can I get the data I need? Can I complete this task? Can I act on behalf of the user?

If you run a web-based business or you create digital advertising, I'm thinking that you have 12 months to adapt. You probably need to build for AI-to-AI interaction. That means exposing your services through APIs that large language models can read, query, and transact with directly. Not doing so means risking invisibility in this new layer of the internet.

This isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a business one. If your competitors become LLM-readable before you, they will capture the first wave of delegated intent—before the user ever reaches a screen.

I'm thinking of this as the Singular Interface Experience (SIE)—a paradigm where users engage through a unified, intelligent interface that replaces traditional app and web-based interactions. At first we'll interface through our web browsers but later through our phone, gadgets ands IOT devices. This interface will be omnipresent, intuitive, and action-capable.

Early Signals

A clear sign of what’s coming is the travel booking feature that Perplexity is testing with Expedia. As shared by Simon Taylor, it’s already live for some users. You don’t need to browse hotel listings, mess with filters, or second-guess reviews. You just ask:

“Find me a hotel in Amsterdam with a serious gym, walkable to conference venues, under €300/night.”

Thirty seconds later: a solid recommendation. The hotel they picked matched what the user already books manually. No scroll fatigue. No fake reviews. No misleading images. The AI acts as a proxy—filtering and selecting on your behalf. It even completes the payment via Stripe.

You’re not going to Expedia. Your SIE assistant is.

What Will Happen to Claude, Manus, Perplexity, and the Rest?

In the '90s, Google changed how search worked and quietly won the race. As Google took over, most of its competitors faded. Some became backend services for others. A few were absorbed into larger systems. Most simply disappeared.

I think ChatGPT is in that same dominant position now. And like the other players during the Google era, Perplexity, Claude, and others may need to pivot. Some will stick around, powering niche capabilities. Others will become utilities called upon by the dominant interface.

And Then There’s Hardware

We know that iPhone designer Jony Ive is building a device with OpenAI and this matters. That product will likely assume this kind of singular interface experience from day one. No apps. No browser. No clutter. It will expect users to speak or write and then deliver results from a world of connected services.

And this shift won’t stop at the device level. Perplexity is reportedly negotiating to be the default AI interface on Samsung phones. It’s like watching the Google/Apple search deal happen again—but this time, for the next generation of interaction.

Implications for Designers, Developers, and Businesses

If your customer is no longer the end user but the AI working for them, everything about your product strategy changes. These are topics that the PSFK team are talking to our clients about when it comes to AI to AI experiences:

• APIs over UIs: Build clear, callable endpoints. Prioritize machine-readability over human navigation.

• AI-to-AI interfaces: Your service needs to talk cleanly to other systems. Think about function chains, not clicks.

• Deprioritize surface UX: Your homepage may matter less than the structure behind your booking or pricing engine.

1. Design for Intent, Not Clicks

Most APIs assume a developer will use them. That’s not enough. To be usable by an LLM, they need to support:

• Natural-language-to-function mapping (“Book me a table at 7pm” → /reservations/create)

• Flexibility in handling vague or incomplete requests

• Helpful error messages that guide the AI toward a better query

2. Public, Well-Documented APIs

LLMs work best with structured documentation. If you want to be accessible to ChatGPT:

• Use OpenAPI 3.0+ specs

• Include examples and clear parameter descriptions

• Host your docs at a public URL

• Keep authentication simple and well-described

(For reference: OpenAI plugins are just OpenAPI-based APIs with a manifest file.)

3. Conversational Transaction Support

You’ll want to support:

• Search: /products/search?query=lawnmower

• Availability: /inventory/check?product_id=123

• Booking: /appointments/book

• Checkout: /checkout/start

Make responses clean and structured (JSON). Include backup options when something’s unavailable. Deliver complete answers—no pagination, no partial info.

4. Think Modular and Composable

Let the AI string together simple actions. For example, in travel:

• /search-flights

• /book-flight

• /get-baggage-policy

Each service should be designed as a single action in a larger sequence the AI can build.

Shopify Gets It

Shopify is already showing signs of where this is headed. Its ChatGPT plugin started as a product discovery tool. But its architecture—and Shopify’s secure checkout—suggest it won’t stop there.

We’re not far from a future where someone asks, “Find me a leather tote under $200,” gets three great picks, chooses one, and completes the transaction—without leaving the chat. That means purchases, upsells, and post-purchase support could all be handled in one interaction. Shopify’s infrastructure and OpenAI’s function-calling make that not just possible—but likely.

In Closing

The web isn’t disappearing—it’s shifting roles. It’s no longer the main event, but the infrastructure underneath. Interfaces powered by AI will sit on top, mediating how people access services, content, and commerce.

That means your website may no longer be the front door to your brand. The interface is. And whether or not your service shows up in that conversation will come down to how well your systems are built for AI-to-AI interaction.

Piers Fawkes, PSFK / Service Buddy

[Images are AI generated, obvs]

[Discuss this newsletter on LinkedIn]

As you may have noticed, we paused our publishing. For a long while, we’ve appreciated the 10s of thousands of people who open our emails but recently, we have been trying to work out the what and why.

What formats/shapes/themes we could be publishing - and by taking such an approach, why would it draw a line to PSFK as a business/employer/project.

If you have 2-3 minutes, I’d appreciate your input into our past and future by filling out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWsJkENS0a-KuQDFIx-8wXMhVjm1j-VXFsoFjZH-7RR_Q2Gg/viewform?usp=header - or drop me a line!

And if you do - you can download any report on our portal!

Piers, Founder, PSFK

piers@psfk.com