Agentic AI – a catch-all term for the deployment of artificial intelligence as autonomous ‘agents’ capable of making decisions and executing actions – is just about the most talked-about trend in tech right now. And like all hot tech trends, there’s plenty of future-gazing discussion about where agentic AI could lead us.
In retail, one of these possibilities is the concept of autonomous shopping. Imagine an app on your phone that’s like a cross between Alexa and Gemini, but trained specifically for retail – a super-smart personal shopping assistant trained on massive retail data models, designed to make purchases on your behalf.
Not only does an autonomous shopping agent know exactly where to look for whatever you ask it for, and can scout and compare the best prices and specifications with maximum efficiency. It also aggregates all your personal data and learns your preferences, tastes, habits, buying patterns, all the different contextual influences that drive your purchase decisions. With the power of predictive AI, it’s so good at anticipating what you want and need, perhaps before you even know it yourself, that you no longer have to give it instructions, if you’re too busy with other things.
The vision is a world where, eventually, AI agents don’t just help with product discovery, research and recommendations, but actually shop on people’s behalf with full autonomy. But how realistic is this?
The lesson of the last couple of decades when it comes to tech is, no matter how fantastically futuristic something sounds, don’t rule it out becoming an everyday reality sooner than you might expect. With regards to autonomous shopping, there’s evidence to suggest that we’re already well on the path.
Consumer demand for AI shopping is rising rapidly
Two things in particular support this assumption. One is that adoption of existing AI tools for retail purposes – specifically, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini – is accelerating at astonishing rates. According to Adobe, traffic to US retail sites originating from people asking a Gen AI tool to find, suggest or compare items for them soared by a massive 4,700% year-on-year in July 2025. OpenAI has moved quickly to cash in by launching a native checkout feature so US users can complete purchases from Etsy sellers and Shopify web stores in the ChatGPT window.
This demonstrates that there’s a real appetite for using AI for shopping. But even more telling is the fact that consumers are already saying that they want more. They want AI retail features that are more specialised and more personal than those currently available through Gen AI platforms. A major recent study by IBM found that top of the consumer wish list for AI-enabled shopping was a ‘deal hunter’ agent, a specialised tool that constantly monitored prices on their behalf to ensure they always got best value for every purchase. A fully-fledged personal shopping assistant came fourth on the list, behind a dedicated support agent that would give them 24/7 personalized post-purchase support, and a product review agent that would instantly summarise user feedback on any product they browsed.
The main takeaway here for retailers is that agent-augmented shopping is certainly on consumers’s radar. And when convenient and desirable, people are happy for that to extend to offloading responsibility for triggering purchases. The history of digital tech has also taught us that, when consumers start to want something, the market usually delivers.
One final point worth drawing from the IBM report is AI’s role in physical shopping journeys. By now, we all know that the average consumer makes little distinction between online and offline shopping, and freely hops between channels at will. IBM’s findings confirm this is the case with AI, too. 72% of people say they still prefer to shop in store, and physical remains the most popular channel for product discovery (62%). But even as they shop in store, 41% of people say they’re happy to use AI assistants to research products, 33% to scour reviews on their behalf, and 31% to compare prices for the best deals.
As AI agents and automated purchasing tools gain more traction in retail, businesses are going to have to make sure their store systems as well as their online channels are primed for a new era of engagement and transaction. And as we’ll explore next time, that has implications for how agentic commerce will progress.