With the festive shopping season starting in just nine weeks, Cloudinary’s second annual Global Retail Survey finds retail teams under pressure from 13 competing buyer priorities, and turning to video, user-generated content (UGC), and generative AI to navigate them. Conducted in partnership with Researchscape International, which polled 539 retailers across 14 countries, the research reveals a sector where everything is critical and nothing can wait. Brands are simultaneously navigating demands that span mobile shopping (43%), high-volume video (42%), social commerce (39%), hyper-personalisation (35%), sustainable production (26%), and seamless omnichannel experiences (25%), with no clear hierarchy or single winning strategy.
The findings also reveal a sector responding to these pressures on three fronts: aggressively scaling video libraries, opening platforms to UGC, and deploying AI across 14 distinct workflow use cases – all while moving from experimental to operational infrastructure. With the festive season approaching, the urgency behind each of these moves has never been higher.
Retailers are all in on video but operations are still catching up
The volume of video content hosted by retailers has scaled dramatically in two years. According to Cloudinary’s 2024 Video Survey, only 8% of e-commerce professionals hosted 1,000 or more videos. By 2026, that figure jumped to 41% – including a new category of retailer emerging at the extreme end of the scale: “mega-hosts,” managing libraries of 100,000 videos or more, representing 6% of those surveyed. Of the retailers surveyed, 62% are even planning to deliver more video this year.
The reason for this growth is that retailers see clear benefits from using video: 70% report that videos build brand trust and confidence; 69% that they improve product credibility; 63% that they drive product purchase; 61% that they improve market awareness/SEO; and 35% that they reduce product returns.
Hosting vast video libraries has created major challenges, however, with the impact on site and app performance ranking as the biggest at 45%. Other operational challenges include the time required to manually format variations for different devices and social channels (42%), the drain on management resources (searching for and managing video assets) and CDN bandwidth (40% and 36%, respectively). As a result, 79% of retailers have adopted AI in their video workflows to scale production, while simultaneously grappling with major site performance issues and formatting bottlenecks.
Safeguarding brands as demand for UGC grows
As shoppers increasingly crave authenticity and trust, more retailers are opening up their platforms to UGC. To maintain brand safety, at scale, retailers are implementing robust, multi-layered moderation workflows supported by AI. Of the retail professionals surveyed, 37% identified UGC as a top buyer trend, 75% have opened up their platforms to accept all types of UGC and 44% of AI-using retailers integrate AI tools for video compliance and moderation.
Social is the storefront
Social media has become the leading channel for retailers (41%), and is with 39% one of the top buyer trends that actively shapes customer experience. A massive 81% of retailers use social media platforms to deliver video content to their consumers. This outpaces all other delivery channels, including websites (71%) and mobile apps (64%). Delivering personalised visual content is highly tied to social interactions; 42% of retailers report that they gain increased social sharing as a direct benefit of their image and video personalisation efforts.
Retailers use of AI has expanded to 14 jobs
In 2026, AI has matured into operational infrastructure. 84% of retailers now use it within their general workflows, and the data reveals something striking: adoption is spread almost evenly across 14 distinct use cases with a tight 10-percentage-point range that signals AI has become embedded across the entire asset pipeline, not concentrated in one area. Top applications include:
Creation & Editing (61%): Background removal, canvas expansion, and smart cropping are the top tasks, reflecting demand for fast, automated image standardisation at scale.
Workflow Automation (56%): Moving assets from production to publication without manual intervention.
Copy Generation (50%): Creating and editing supporting text for visual assets.
The future peak of this AI evolution is the AI concierge. According to the survey, 71% of organizations plan to deploy AI concierges and digital stylists this year, marking it as the top next-generation digital experience on the 2026 roadmap.
According to Cloudinary’s SVP marketing Angie Geffen, “The data is clear. Visual content is a primary driver of retail competitiveness, and the brands that manage it well are positioned to pull ahead of those that don’t. Our survey shows that when retailers lack the right infrastructure, operational bottlenecks surface across multiple areas simultaneously. With 13 consumer trends competing for attention and the holiday season approaching, the ability to move from creative concept to flawless delivery, automatically and at scale, is what separates the brands that win the season from the ones that struggle through it.”
