Technology Specialist
Simon Seddon writes about technology from twenty-plus years wrestling crafting digital solutions and interfaces with it. He's Tech Lead at a UK fashion retailer, and his particular interest is digital commerce that actually works for everyone. That is, performance and accessibility baked in from the architecture up, not retrofitted or languishing in the backlog.
His specialism is the part of retail technology most readers never see: front-end engineering at scale, the architectural decisions that determine whether a site can safely and reliably ship features at a predictable cadence, and the operational application of AI as practical business leverage rather than cinema. He is a card-carrying AI evangelist — the sincere kind, not the conference-deck kind — and has originated AI-generated content production capabilities now live in customer-facing production, and built internal AI-backed platforms that have shifted how the wider business uses generative AI day-to-day.
Simon has led digital teams in Liverpool and Manchester, as well as overseas in Asia. He has full-stack accumin working in FMCG, Sports, Fashion, Hospitality, Property and Finance. His career began in print design and technical artworking for many well-known food and drink brands you'll find in supermarket aisles, and that grounding still shapes his interest in the interface between commerce platforms, user experience, and the technical frameworks that hold them together. He currently writes from Manchester, UK.
He fondly remembers, with rose-tinted glasses: table-based layouts, 1x1 spacer gifs, floppy disks, and Macromedia Director/Flash. For personal projects he deploys on Vercel and is not sorry about it.
All views expressed are his own and not reflective of employers, past or present.
ONS puts UK retail AI adoption at 17%. India, Singapore and China sit at 50–59% on the equivalent IBM measure. The headline gap is real, and the story underneath it is more interesting than the headline.
NVIDIA and SAP's Sapphire collaboration gives enterprise AI agents what they've been missing: the governance infrastructure to actually act, not just advise.
In January 2024, NRF was full of AI announcements and cautious optimism. In May 2026, the infrastructure is built, the first data is in, and the picture is (like most things in commerce) more complicated than the enthusiasts or the sceptics predicted. Here's my honest read.
I spent an evening at The Lookout in Bishopsgate listening to Vercel's CPO, ElevenLabs, M&S, and Virgin Media O2 talk about building for the agent era. The view from the 50th floor was spectacular. The ideas were harder to shake.
Manchester Tech Festival 2025 ran from 23 September to 2 October. The core conference was at Victoria Baths on the 24th and 25th. The dedicated AI conference followed on 1 October at DiSH MCR. A year on from the 2024 festival, the AI conversation has moved significantly. Not everywhere in the same direction.
Manchester Tech Festival ran from 28 October to 8 November 2024, with the main conference at Victoria Baths and a dedicated AI Conference on 31 October at Friends Meeting House. If you want to know how the Northern tech community is genuinely engaging with AI, rather than performing enthusiasm at it, it was worth attending.
Manchester Digital's Ecommerce Conference 2024 filled a room at No.1 Circle Square with Northern practitioners rather than vendors. The AI conversation that followed was more honest for it.