The next phase of retail growth will be won or lost on the industry’s ability to understand, anticipate and adapt to the needs of its changing customers, be they Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials or the Gen Zers who are re-writing the rules once again! The speed and scale of today’s demographic shift is unlike anything the UK retail industry has faced before. Here, Oscar Strachen, Digital Strategy Consultant at Columbus, explores three ways retailers can successfully navigate the generational crossroad: buyer profiling, understanding what matters most to each generation, and closing the back-office gap.

The retail sector has always been shaped by generational waves that bring distinct habits, expectations and priorities. Baby Boomers built the modern department store era and fuelled the introduction of credit, Gen X drove high-value spend, Millennials accelerated eCommerce adoption, and now Gen Z are rewriting the rules of discovery and loyalty as they’re set to become one of the main revenue drivers. Consumer confidence remains uncertain and digital-first platforms have shaped customer expectations. Today’s revenue is still driven by Gen X and Millennials, but within five years, retailers expect Gen Z to almost triple its contribution, drastically reshaping demand patterns. But is the retail industry ready?

A recent Columbus study, which surveyed 100+ senior UK retail leaders across eCommerce, multichannel, and store-led businesses, reveals a sector that is both acutely aware of its demographic pivot, yet under-prepared to act on it. Only six in ten retailers feel confident in knowing which generations dominate their customer base, with just 52% having faith in their systems to keep pace with the shifting behaviours. So how can retailers close this gap?

It’s time to bridge the consumer divide!

The future of retail success is not just about serving one generation better than another. True success requires retailers to build organisations and systems that can flex across generations. However, the study pinpoints silos, legacy technology and cultural inertia as the main barriers holding many retailers back. The challenge now is to bridge the gap between what the front-end promises and what the back-end can deliver to serve the generational reliability expectations. Only this way will retailers be able to build trust, loyalty and sustained profitability.

1. Power shifts at checkout – new buyers will hold the purse strings 

Currently, Gen X (42.2%) and Millennials (34.9%) are retail’s biggest revenue contributors, with Gen Z lagging behind at 9.2%, but in just five years, this outlook is set to change dramatically. Leaders expect Millennials to remain dominant (39.5%), while Gen Z is expected to almost triple its contribution (22.9%) and usurp Gen X. The increase in social commerce adoption (such as TikTok Shop) is a driver behind this shift in buying power, with 66% of Gen Z consumers using social media as a research tool. So how can retailers adapt their strategies to keep pace?

It’s important retailers learn to map today’s revenue by generation and channel. When trying to understand younger consumers, retailers can start by identifying stock-keeping units (SKUs) with high discovery and conversion. Retailers can appeal to more Gen Z consumers with unified commerce, which transforms many channels into one brand by pooling inventory, orders and customer context, allowing shopping journeys to be smooth from click to purchase.

2. Long-term loyalty cannot be locked in with short-term wins

Against a backdrop of rising cost of living and increasing housing costs, younger consumers are facing acute financial strain, with 80% of UK adults believing younger generations are worse off today than two decades ago. Yet despite this, one in five retailers hasn’t changed their strategies to reflect this financial reality.

Many retailers offer ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) checkout alternatives, which appeal to Gen Z and Millennials. In fact, the FCA reports that 20% of UK adults regularly use BNPL. But while usage has significantly increased, BNPL sits squarely in the regulatory crosshairs as draft FCA rules increase affordability checks and greater transparency, which could dent conversion rates. So, retailers must proceed with caution and treat BNPL as a tool not a crutch – but what alternative strategies can retailers explore?

3. Address the back-office gap to achieve store-front success

Operational readiness remains a key challenge for retailers, 22.4% of retailers don’t differentiate operations by generations at all. Process-driven mindsets, disconnected marketing and a lack of shared metrics linking back office to CX reveal a significant disconnect.

In a tight market, where retail sales growth is modest, every broken promise is magnified, especially for Gen Z. A wrong delivery date, slow refund or a botched click-and-collect can be detrimental and often result in not just a disappointed customer, but a competitor gaining a potential customer. This is why operational agility is no longer a back-office issue but vital for storefront success. 

Start owning the moments that matter most to customers

Too often, retailers measure process outputs such as stock turns, fulfilment cost and SLA adherence that rarely capture the lived reality of the customer. If the goal is to adapt to shifting generational behaviour, the metrics must change too, otherwise, retailers risk not only missing sales but also eroding the loyalty that underpins long-term growth. Instead, operational KPIs such as promise-data accuracy, refund time-to-wallet and first contact to resolution should sit on every retailer’s dashboard. Collectively, these KPIs close the gap between what the business thinks it’s delivering and what the customer actually experiences. 

From fragmentation to future-fit

UK retail sits at a crucial crossroads. Generations don’t just define who the customers are but also whether a business is built for the future or left behind in the past. The consumer divide is real, but by no means unbridgeable. Retailers don’t need to rip and replace everything overnight, but they need to build knowledge on exactly which generation drives which product or channel and design experiences that respect the emotional realities of each for long-term success. Retailers need to remember, Generation Alpha are only just around the corner

The event was part of Cokethorpe Enterprises’ Business Breakfast Forum series, a termly event held at Cokethorpe School near Witney.

It brings together employers, senior leaders, and the school’s network of business-owning parents for a morning of discussion, networking and fresh insight.

Leadership was the theme for this term’s forum and Witney and West Oxfordshire MP Charlie Maynard delivered the keynote address.

Mr Maynard said: “Leadership in business and in public life shares a common foundation; listening, accountability and a clear sense of purpose.

“It was a pleasure to join so many local business leaders at Cokethorpe to exchange ideas on navigating change, supporting growth and building stronger communities.”

Dr Sarah Squire, head of Cokethorpe School (Image: Cokethorpe School)

He shared perspectives from his career in international business and public life, including co-founding BDA Partners, an Asia-focused advisory firm, where he spent 24 years growing the business to more than 120 employees across nine global offices.

The event opened with a networking breakfast, followed by wider discussion around leadership, innovation and the future of business across the region.

Dr Sarah Squire, head of Cokethorpe School, said: “It was fantastic to see so many business leaders come together for this term’s forum.

“Our Business Breakfasts are hugely important to us, as a platform for businesses to connect and share insight, across learning, leadership and the local community.

“They also further inspire our pupils about opportunities in the world of work.”

The Business Breakfast Forums regularly attract major speakers from across business, politics and industry.

Previous guests have included entrepreneur, celebrity chef and musician Levi Roots and senior leaders from the agricultural and retail sectors.

Themes have ranged from leadership and disruption to artificial intelligence.

This term’s forum was sponsored by Clifton Bookkeeping, Philip Dennis Foodservice and JJ Hunt Photography.

The sessions are part of Cokethorpe’s wider efforts to build a professional network that benefits both business leaders and pupils, providing students with unique access to mentoring opportunities, workplace insights and professional connections that help bridge the gap between education and the world of work.

Cokethorpe Enterprises operates within the Cokethorpe group with a distinct commercial focus, hosting teambuilding, training, away days and weddings.

The school sits on 150 acres of Oxfordshire parkland and is an independent co-educational day school for pupils aged four to 18.

With around 600 students, it combines academic achievement with a focus on personal development, preparing young people to thrive in an ever-changing world.

Cequence Security said Anthropic, Dr. Chase Cunningham and Cequence have aligned on a behaviour-based approach to securing AI agents. It described this convergence as a shift in how the industry defines zero trust for agentic AI.

The shared view centres on a simple point: the main risk from AI agents lies not in whether they can log in, but in what they do after access is granted. The work of Anthropic, Cunningham’s research and Cequence’s AI Gateway architecture all point to controls that monitor and restrict runtime behaviour rather than relying mainly on authentication.

That marks a departure from traditional cybersecurity practice, which has focused on verifying identity at the point of entry. With autonomous software agents, the concern is that an authorised system may still carry out harmful actions, misuse APIs or remove sensitive data through approved channels.

The issue is drawing more attention as businesses move AI agents from trial environments into live operations. These systems are being used with access to internal tools, sensitive datasets and production systems, raising the stakes if an agent behaves unexpectedly or is manipulated by malicious prompts.

Cequence said this environment requires zero trust principles to be applied continuously throughout an agent’s activity. In practice, that means checking the context of each action, limiting the resources available to the agent and enforcing policy at the level of individual transactions.

Shreyans Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Cequence Security, set out that argument directly.

“Most security teams are still trying to tackle AI risk with prompt detection and short-lived tokens – basically, really tight sign-in security. But that misses the point entirely. You can nail authentication and still get burned by an agent running amok inside the castle,” said Shreyans Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Cequence Security.

Mehta also pointed to what he sees as broader agreement across the sector.

“Anthropic, Dr. Cunningham and Cequence all recognised early on that the gamechanger is securing agent behaviour. Seeing the whole industry pivot hard toward that truth, toward the approach we baked into the AI Gateway from day one, is the ultimate validation. It crowns the AI Gateway as the new reference architecture for the space,” he said.

Security model

Cunningham, who has published research on what he calls Agentic Zero Trust, framed the problem in similar terms. In his view, established controls focus too heavily on the “front gate” and do not address what happens once an AI system is inside a network or application environment.

“Traditional security controls focus obsessively on the front gate – who gets in. But with AI agents, the real damage happens after the front gate, through totally authorised channels,” said Dr. Chase Cunningham, a leading expert on Zero Trust security.

“You have to extend zero trust inside, to cover not just authentication, but every action an agent takes. Cequence’s AI Gateway is a huge leap toward that goal, toward getting zero trust to fully cover the AI agent threat model,” Cunningham said.

The broader technical argument is that AI agents can combine a series of individually permissible steps into harmful or unintended outcomes. Because those patterns may only become visible as they unfold, static rules or one-off login checks may not be enough to stop them.

That is why the behaviour-based model emphasises real-time monitoring and intervention. Instead of treating access approval as the main control, the system applies checks throughout the session, looking at which tools are being called, what data is being requested and whether the sequence of actions fits policy.

CIS guidance

Cequence also linked this thinking to the Model Context Protocol Companion Guide from the Centre for Internet Security. The guide adapts the CIS Controls to address risks that arise when AI agents interact with enterprise tools, systems and information, and identifies the protocol layer as an important point for governance.

According to Cequence, the guide calls for explicit tool-level permissions, audit trails for interactions and real-time protection for sensitive data. It said those ideas align with the design of its AI Gateway, which creates least-privilege agent profiles, records API activity and inspects requests and responses for sensitive information.

Mehta drew a direct link between the policy framework and implementation.

“The CIS MCP Companion Guide defines what enterprises should do; the Cequence AI Gateway operationalises it,” he said.

“The guide calls for explicit tool-level permissions, auditable interactions, and real-time sensitive data protection. AI Gateway delivers by generating least-privilege agent personas, logging every API call, and applying DLP scanning to tool requests and responses. It takes the CIS framework from theory to practice,” Mehta said.

The debate comes as security teams face a faster threat environment shaped by AI on both sides. Cequence argued that attack timelines are shrinking sharply, making immediate visibility into API calls and data flows more important as organisations deploy agents into business processes.

Cequence said its platform protects more than 10 billion daily API interactions and 4 billion user accounts.