Buying something in the shops used to be as simple as choosing the item and handing over the money. But in recent years, the great British shopping experience has dramatically changed. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) is patrolling Britain's retail stores to keep an eye on customers as they stock up on essentials. Now, people are subjected to a slew of AI-powered tech, including intelligent surveillance cameras, robots, facial recognition systems and online age checks. Home Bargains is the latest to follow the trend, with a new AI-enabled security system that watches you while you scan your own items.

Using a technology called facial age estimation, John Lewis' online store can now check whether shoppers are over 18 without needing to see their ID.

Lewis: An ideal experience is something like the help desk at a library. Depending on your question, the librarian may just need to provide a short direct answer or refer you to the reference or periodicals section. Similarly, a search engine needs to align the relevance strategy for each case. For example, for information found in periodicals, the recency of the news or journal publication is important in determining the relevance for the search engine. But the relevance ranking of search results should not penalize a document entered into the system two years ago when looking for factual information that has not changed. For short answers, specific answers should appear that also hyperlink back into the larger documents.

Some of the most popular Christmas presents are being sold online with mark-ups of more than 70% after selling out in major high street stores because of the global shortage of microchips. Supply-chain bottlenecks and the computer-chip shortages are affecting availability of some of the most sought-after gifts, from games consoles to Dyson products. Shoppers were warned last week of a delay of at least one month for some of the most popular iPad models. Games consoles have been in limited supply for most of the pandemic, and companies are struggling to cope with the surge in demand for Christmas. Customers have attacked "scalpers" online for buying stock and pushing up prices.

Ocado's warehouse in Erith, 15 miles east of London on the Thames estuary, is staffed by 1,050 "personal shoppers". Outnumbering them are 1,800 robots the size of small washing machines. You see them by climbing to the top level of the vast warehouse – at 564,000 sq ft, it is more than three times the size of St Peter's in Rome – where a sign tells you that photography is strictly prohibited. The online supermarket is paranoid that rivals will glimpse the technology it believes to be revolutionary. From the viewing platform you can watch these metal cubes endlessly whiz around, moving thousands of plastic crates as if they were playing an enormous game of chess. You occasionally sight bottles of bleach or rosé, packets of noodles and dog biscuits, before they are sent down to a lower level. "I find it quite mesmerising, like robotic ballet," says Mel Smith, CEO of Ocado Retail, the UK arm of the business. "The day I decided I wanted this job was when I went to [the warehouse] and thought, this is absolutely the future."

Mayra Leiva of Reseda, California, knew her eight-year-old son was a little interested in history. But she was surprised when all at once he became a walking encyclopedia, spouting dates and pretending every tire swing was a time machine. "It happened after he saw Night at the Museum," she says. I've had to do a lot of Googling to keep up!" Not many children will tell you that their favorite school subject is history. Memorizing dates and learning long-ago facts that don't seem relevant isn't exactly high on their fun list. Perhaps that's why pop culture--movies, music, television, and even video games and comic books--can be such useful teaching tools. "Teaching through pop culture helps students relate history to their own background and experiences," says Gail Hudson, a fifth-grade teacher and 2020 Nevada Teacher of the Year. "It's tying into something that's already caught their interest." Take the movie version of the Broadway show Hamilton, which releases on Disney July 3.

Panelists Remo Gettini, CTO of Depop; Susan Young, Head of Trading & Operations at John Lewis & Partners; Katie Baron, Head of Retail at Stylus; Julia Dietmar, CPO at Vue.ai spoke about'The Changing Face of Retail & Why AI is Crucial'. The panel was moderated by Brooke Roberts-Islam, founder of TechStyler, who gathered insight from the experts about how #automation & #ai will be key players in the world fashion retail in the near future. Watch the video to listen to what the panelists had to say about #AI in fashion retail!

A decade ago, the British department-store chain John Lewis built itself a long warehouse, painted in gradations of sky blue. The shed, as it is called in the industry, cost £100m and covered 650,000 sq ft. Windsor Castle could easily fit inside it. John Lewis named the shed Magna Park 1, after the site where it stands: a "logistics campus" of warehouses, roads, shipping containers and truck bays east of Milton Keynes. Magna Park 1 was intended to supply the company's stores around southern England, but almost as soon as it was finished, John Lewis realised that it wasn't enough. The pace of e-commerce was flying, and Magna Park 1 opened in the midst of a spell in which, between 2006 and 2016, the share of John Lewis deliveries going direct to customers rose 12-fold. So John Lewis built Magna Park 2, measuring 675,000 sq ft. After that, the company realised it needed a new shed for Waitrose, its supermarket chain, where home deliveries were skyrocketing, too. "It became a bit of a standing joke," said Philip Stanway, a regional director at Chetwoods, the architecture firm that designed and built all these facilities. "They used to come to meetings with their forecasts, and they'd say: 'Screw this. This is the new forecast,'" Stanway said, making a scribbling motion in the manner of a John Lewis executive hastily updating the numbers. "We couldn't build the buildings quick enough for them."

It is early July, almost 30C outside, but Mihkel Jäätma is thinking about Christmas. In a co-working space in Soho, the 39-year-old founder and CEO of Realeyes, an "emotion AI" startup which uses eye-tracking and facial expression to analyse mood, scrolls through a list of 20 festive ads from 2018. He settles on The Boy and the Piano, the offering from John Lewis that tells the life story of Elton John backwards, from megastardom to the gift of a piano from his parents as a child, accompanied by his timeless heartstring-puller Your Song. The ad was well received, but Jäätma is clearly unconvinced. He hits play, and the ad starts, but this time two lines – one grey (negative reactions), the other red (positive) – are traced across the action.

In a year of High Street gloom one item beamed bright from the sales figures - the giant TV screen. It may still be a tiny segment of the market but sales are rocketing. Dixons Carphone saw a 70% surge in the sale of screens over 65in over Christmas, and a tripling of sales of screens sized 75in or more. John Lewis said sales of 70in TVs have risen 150% compared with last year, partly thanks to a spike in sales from the World Cup. According to the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (Barb) sales of screens over 40in have been on the increase since at least the beginning of the decade.