AI in retail is no longer just about automation. It’s about creating smarter, more personalized, and seamlessly connected shopping experiences, ones that fundamentally redefine how customers discover, decide, and buy.
As Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, aptly puts it:
“AI is becoming transformative for our business, and we really haven’t had a technology revolution as large as this since the start of the internet.”
Ecommerce Tech has moved from chatbots, AR/VR and wifi powered devices like Amazon Dash buttons to Agent powered customer experiences, drone delivery, hyper personalization, cashier less stores and data driven insights for decision making.
Top retailers – Walmart and Amazon have already AI assistants in-built into their ecommerce websites and apps – Sparky and Rufus respectively. Walmart partnered with Open AI in October 2025 to redefine its customers’ shopping experiences.
Popular COTS Platforms have all AI components offered in conjunction with their platforms. IBM was the pioneer and had Watson integrated with their erstwhile IBM Websphere Commerce way back in 2015. Einstein (Salesforce), Sensei (Adobe), Loomi (Bloomreach), Joule (SAP) are some examples of AI solutions from Ecommerce platform providers.
In the last year, Agentic AI has changed the way customers do Online shopping.
For Shoppers, Agents can compare prices across sites, apply the best coupons, and purchase a “weekly grocery list” automatically.
For Retailers, Agents handle backend operations like dynamic pricing, “smart” restocking based on trend analysis, and resolving customer support tickets instantly.
Thanks to Agentic AI, Customer Journeys are also now moving from keywords to natural conversations. This is a fundamental shift in online shopping – Keywords (“Milk”, “Diapers”) vs Goals (“I’m hosting a Themed birthday party for my 7-year-old and 10 of his friends this Saturday. I have a $100 budget. Can you handle the decorations and goody bags? I need it delivered by Friday. “), List of products vs Solutions (Recipes + Cart + Instructions), from where the User clicks “Add to Cart” to now where the Agent builds the Cart for the consumer.
Google has recently announced its community driven Open Standard – Universal Control Protocol (UCP), which will integrate the retailer brand’s checkout with Google Gemini. Customers will have an agent powered shopping experience.
UCP enables AI agents help perform customers ecommerce flows across any brand’s website – from discovering products to managing carts to perform checkouts,
More on this and key AI innovations from the recently concluded NRF (National Retailer Federation) in Part 2.