The agentic future of retail: Are you ready for AI that shops?

Traditionally, the customer journey has centred around search, browse, evaluate, and purchase. But with AI agents, the journey becomes: "Tell me what I need" → Delegate → Result.

OpenAI’s recently announced “Operator” framework for agents, Walmart’s in-app AI assistant “Sparky,” and Visa’s AI-enabled payment flows are just early signals. And while these technologies are still evolving, they’re gaining momentum quickly.

Instead of consumers scrolling through dozens of products, agents will curate, filter, and decide. As they learn from user behaviour, preferences, and outcomes, they’ll only get more precise-and more powerful.

This new landscape raises some big strategic questions:

• Who are you really selling to-humans or their agents?
  As decision-making becomes increasingly delegated, factors like rich product data, real-time availability, and clear pricing will carry more weight than emotional creative or brand heritage.
• Can your systems talk to AI agents?
  Agents need structured, accessible data to function effectively. Retailers will need to expose not just product info, but also delivery timeframes, stock levels, and returns policies-cleanly and consistently.
• How do you compete for visibility in a world without browsing?
  If agents are filtering out 95% of products before a human ever sees them, new forms of "agent optimisation" may emerge-where accuracy, trustworthiness, and relevance become the new SEO.

Retail media, built on the assumption that customers are seeing and responding to on-site and off-site ads, may also need to evolve.

Some potential implications:

• Ad formats could shift from eye-catching visuals to metadata-rich listings designed to be parsed by machines.
• Influence may move upstream, from inspiring humans to informing agents.
• Reporting and measurement frameworks may need to adjust to zero-click journeys and AI-to-AI transactions.

While mainstream adoption may take time, the pace of innovation is accelerating. The presence of agentic AI in search, shopping, and payments suggests this isn’t a niche experiment-it’s a paradigm shift in progress.

Retailers who start preparing now-by improving data hygiene, enabling real-time system integrations, and rethinking digital shelf strategy-stand to benefit from early mover advantage.

Not every purchase will be delegated to AI. People will always crave discovery, storytelling, and human connection in some shopping moments. But for many categories, replenishables, high-consideration repeats, or anything involving comparison agents will become the default channel.

And when that happens, the question won’t be “How do I sell this to a shopper?”

It’ll be: “How do I make this the agent’s top choice?”