Agentic AI in Retail: How Autonomous Shopping Is Redefining the Customer Journey

Source: Aaron Cheris, Mikey Vu, Marc-André Kamel, Leah Johns, Stephanie Koszyk, Maureen Burns and Ruth Lewis; Bain & Company · 2026-05-14

Agentic AI is disrupting the shopper journey as third-party agents disintermediate the top of the funnel. Even so, consumers trust retail-owned agents three times more to complete transactions.

Today, AI accounts for up to a quarter of referral traffic for some retailers, yet it is still less than 1% of their total traffic.

Leading retailers will build on-site agents that respond to shoppers’ intent and help them navigate purchase complexity, but they will also partner with third-party agents to be where shoppers are.

Going forward, winning retailers will invest in their on-site value proposition, reinvent retail media, and protect control over data, fulfillment, and checkout where possible to avoid commoditization.

Throughout the purchase process, AI agents are starting to take on the heavy lifting for consumers: recommending options, hunting for deals, checking stock for hot items, and finding smart substitutions.

Agentic AI—a set of autonomous systems that acts on a user’s behalf—has the potential to reshape every step of the shopper journey from research to purchase. While timing and depth of adoption are uncertain, autonomous agents are already redefining the rules of search, advertising, personalization, fulfillment, payments, and post-purchase support. The choices retailers make now will determine whether they shape the future or are sidelined by it.

What’s more, Bain’s Consumer Lab Generative AI Survey found that today, around 30% of US consumers say they use generative AI for product comparison and recommendations.

Agentic AI goes further than suggestions, combining memory, reasoning, and tool use to act semi- or fully autonomously across the shopping journey. Near term, agents could analyze shopper behavior to recommend personalized options, bundle offers in real time, and streamline checkout. Eventually, agents may execute full transactions without human input.

Consumers aren’t quite there yet: Around half say they aren’t comfortable letting AI handle an end-to-end transaction without their involvement. That’s likely, in part, because they haven’t tried it yet. If trust catches up, the trajectory is clear.

To understand the stakes, it’s pragmatic to consider the bookends. At a minimum, the top of the marketing funnel has already been disrupted. As AI engines become a default shopping starting point, and discovery shifts to agent-curated answers, traditional paid search will be harder to attribute and optimize. Retailers will need new ways to get on agents’ lists and measure results. On the other end of the disruption spectrum, agents could entirely disintermediate multibrand retailers and turn direct-to-consumer brands into indirect ones, becoming next-gen marketplaces that control transactions, compress margins, and capture data. Shopping agents could relegate retailers to drop shippers or commoditized fulfillment mechanisms.

We’ll likely land somewhere in the middle, but either end justifies action. Leading retailers will prepare for the full range of outcomes.

Three types of AI agents are emerging, each reshaping retail in different ways.

Third-party “objective” agents: Platforms such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini crawl vendor sites, aggregate listings, compare prices, read reviews, and recommend products. More consumers are starting with these agents for easy, comprehensive research. In fact, according to according to estimates from Similarweb, a digital marketing intelligence company, shopping referrals from ChatGPT have more than doubled in the US, France, UK, and Germany over the past year.

On-site retailer agents: Some retailers are developing proprietary AI assistants to enhance discovery and conversion within their ecosystems. For example, Amazon’s Rufus helps customers research and compare products, and it answers product-specific questions. Amazon estimates that Rufus helped generate nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales last year. In its first quarter earnings, the retailer shared that monthly active Rufus users were up 115% and were 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Magalu, the Brazilian electronics giant, launched Lu within WhatsApp to recommend products, process payment, and optimize for delivery and service evaluation. These agents have the added advantage of collecting proprietary retailer data, such as return rates and reasons, expert reviews, and longer-term purchase history.

Off-site retailer agents. To remain a starting point for search and to bolster loyalty, some retailers are also building agents that help customers shop beyond their own inventory. Amazon’s “Buy for Me” agentic feature can purchase on other brands’ sites, even as the retailer restricts other agents from scraping its own listings.

Of these models, third-party agents pose the greatest immediate threat to the traditional retailer-shopper and retailer-advertiser relationships. The dilemma is real: On one hand, agents can expand reach and reduce customer acquisition costs. If competitors open up, retailers that hold back could lose visibility and relevance. On the other hand, retailers that engage without a differentiated value proposition and the ability to compel direct consumer traffic risk disintermediation and commoditization.

A more consequential shift could be the emergence of agent-assembled baskets. Multi-item, multivendor carts would make agents far more valuable to shoppers with complex missions, such as planning a full family trip across lodging, transit, dining, and activities. But they also raise the stakes for retailers. If agents can fragment the basket across vendors, the concept of a retailer-owned basket could start to disappear, especially in categories such as grocery. And greater price transparency could intensify price competition and put further pressure on margins.

Luckily, shoppers say that they trust retailers’ on-site agents three times more than third-party agents—for now.