The Delivery Conference, 2–3 February 2026, London
Set against the early-February calm of London, when the city feels sharp, focused, and oddly receptive to big ideas, The Delivery Conference 2026 returns to the Royal Lancaster Hotel with the quiet confidence of an event that knows exactly what it is. On 2–3 February, Metapack and ShipStation will once again draw senior leaders from retail, ecommerce, and logistics into the same rooms, the same conversations, the same slightly over-strong coffees between sessions. More than 500 global brands are expected, which sounds like a statistic until you picture the hallways filling up: heads of delivery, product leads, founders, analysts, all comparing notes on what actually works now that delivery has become one of the most emotionally charged parts of the customer journey.
The tone of this year’s conference is unapologetically forward-looking, but not in a speculative, buzzword-heavy way. Al Ko, CEO of Auctane, frames it around a simple tension most retailers already feel in their bones: customers expect delivery to be fast, flexible, transparent, and almost invisible, while operations underneath grow more complex by the quarter. TDC 2026 leans into that friction. AI, predictive intelligence, automation, and real-time decision-making are not presented as shiny add-ons but as tools that are already reshaping fulfilment, last-mile execution, customer promise, and ultimately profitability. The message is clear, even if it lands softly: experimentation is no longer enough, intelligence has to be embedded where it counts.
The conference opens on 2 February with customer user groups and a welcome reception, a format that deliberately eases people in before the main intellectual lift. These early conversations tend to be where the most honest insights surface, when vendors, retailers, and partners admit what broke last peak season and what they quietly fixed afterward. The full-day main conference follows on 3 February, unfolding across more than 20 sessions that touch technology, sustainability, customer experience, and cross-border delivery, weaving between keynotes, panels, AI-driven showcases, and workshops without feeling frantic. The day closes on a lighter note, with live music and a special performance from Alexandra Burke, turning the final networking moments into something closer to a shared exhale than a formal wrap-up.
One of the most anticipated moments comes at the close, when Richard Ayoade takes the stage for the closing keynote. Known for his precise wit and sideways observations, Ayoade brings an outsider’s clarity to topics that can easily become overly technical. His session promises a cultural and technological reading of ecommerce and logistics, touching AI-powered delivery, shifting consumer expectations, and the odd contradictions that appear when machines get smarter but humans remain, reassuringly, human. It’s a deliberate choice of voice, slightly irreverent, slightly disarming, and well suited to an audience that spends most of the year immersed in dashboards and SLAs.
The broader speaker lineup reads like a cross-section of the modern retail and delivery ecosystem, from practitioners to provocateurs. Figures such as Mary Portas and Arka Dhar from Google DeepMind join Al Ko to explore how delivery can carry purpose and empathy, not just parcels, reframing fulfilment as part of brand storytelling rather than a back-office function. Analysts like Natalie Berg and Ian Jindal sit alongside operators from FedEx, Decathlon UK, and Metapack, grounding theory in the stubborn realities of scale. Sessions range from AI-driven automation showcases to panels on turning fulfilment into a strategic advantage, quietly reinforcing the idea that delivery is no longer a cost centre to be tolerated but a differentiator to be designed.
Between sessions, the exhibition hall adds another layer of texture. Thirty exhibitors will present the latest in ecommerce delivery technology, and while exhibition halls are often treated as secondary spaces, at TDC they tend to become practical classrooms. Conversations drift from stands to sofas, demos blur into impromptu consulting sessions, and partnerships begin in the small gaps between scheduled programming. By the time the closing keynote lands and the lights soften for the evening celebration, the sense is less of a conference ending and more of a set of ideas being released back into the industry.
The Delivery Conference 2026 positions itself not as a prediction engine but as a reality check for where intelligent delivery already stands. In a sector moving fast enough to make last year’s playbooks feel outdated, TDC offers something increasingly rare: shared understanding. For two days in London, delivery stops being an abstract operational challenge and becomes a collective conversation about how retail, technology, and human expectation now intersect, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, but always with consequences that reach far beyond the warehouse door.