Kate Ancketill

Kate Ancketill is CEO and founder of GDR/London and a globally recognised retail futurist who translates emerging trends in AI, experience, and circularity into three-to-five-year strategies for the world's leading brands. Named Best AI & Future Technology Speaker in 2025, she has delivered the keynote trends presentation at NRF's Big Show for ten consecutive years and advises over 30 major consumer brands including Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Sephora, and Lego. Her sessions equip leaders with practical roadmaps they can implement immediately, from making product data AI-ready to designing immersive retail spaces, empowering organisations to navigate agentic AI and evolving customer expectations with confidence and clarity.

For ten consecutive years, Kate Ancketill has opened the world's largest retail technology event with the trends keynote that sets the agenda for the year ahead. As CEO and founder of GDR/London, she has built a reputation for translating the complex forces reshaping commerce into strategies that global leaders can act on immediately. Named Best AI & Future Technology Speaker in 2025, Kate has become the trusted innovation partner to more than 30 of the world's leading consumer brands, including Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Sephora, and Lego. Her work centres on three transformative forces: artificial intelligence, experiential retail, and circularity. She helps organisations understand not only what is coming, but how to respond with confidence and clarity.

Kate's expertise spans over 25 years of research into retail innovation, consumer behaviour, and emerging technology. Her team at GDR/London conducts rigorous global research, identifying trends and innovation case studies from Tokyo to Dubai that demonstrate how leading brands are adapting to profound shifts such as agentic AI, the dopamine economy, and the transformation of physical stores into immersive community spaces. At the NRF Big Show, her presentations have consistently earned top feedback scores, and her approach of pairing clear trend analysis with concrete innovation examples has been praised as sharp, concrete, and actionable. Kate's speaking engagements have taken her to stages worldwide, and her insights are grounded in a core belief: technology should serve human connection, not replace it. Whether advising boards, keynoting global conferences, or leading webinars, she makes the future feel both urgent and accessible, helping leaders see what others miss.

Kate equips audiences with practical roadmaps they can implement immediately, even on modest budgets. Her sessions provide quick wins such as making product data AI-ready, creating small user-generated content spots in-store, and testing shoppable livestreams. She guides organisations through next steps including pop-up collaborations, endless aisle solutions, and avatar-based selling, then maps longer-term strategies around modular store layouts, trade-in schemes, and verified second-hand services. Leaders leave her presentations with tangible recommendations that address real challenges: how to ensure AI agents recommend their products, how to design fewer but more immersive stores, and how to integrate circularity as an expected part of their business model. Audiences walk away not just informed about future trends, but motivated and equipped to adapt boldly, having discovered new solutions and perspectives that fundamentally change how they see their business and the opportunities ahead.