Online Shopping Could Be AI’s Next Victim

Since the dawn of retail, merchants’ primary job has been to tempt human shoppers to part with their cash. Now they have a new customer to woo: the bots.

It’s still early days, but we are entering the age of agentic commerce, where autonomous artificial intelligence chatbots will be the ones selecting and buying the goods. It’s a shift that has the potential to rewire digital shopping. But for that to happen, as it did with mobile phones more than a decade ago, consumers will need to embrace the new technology and retailers must find a way to engage that doesn’t eat into their profit margins.