When it comes to retail, it’s not just about who has the best products and prices. You also need to serve your customers to the highest standard. The retail sector is undergoing its most significant transformation since the arrival of e-commerce. We have moved past simple chatbots into the era of agentic AI in commerce.
Earlier in this blog series, we looked at how AI agents will transform B2B sales and what this looks like in practice. In this post, we’ll talk about how AI agents are changing the retail and wholesale business in two important ways:
How the shopping experience will change now and in the near future and how your business is run.
Changing how people shop: the "concierge" customer experience
AI agents will drastically change the way we shop. Consumers will be turning to AI agents to find, evaluate, and eventually make the purchase of products and services on their behalf. It means that everyone will be able to benefit from a personal shopper. Here’s how that will change the retail sector:
Dreaming with AI: Planning life events is already happening more and more with the help of AI-enabled tools. The early phases of the customer journey can be covered by chatting with an AI agent. For retailers, this could mean that customers come to a retailer’s channels only when they are ready to check out. Brands need to rethink how they stay visible and relevant. It’s all about building trust during those quiet moments between purchases and making sure your brand is part of the conversation when the dreaming starts. At the very least, retailers need to serve AI agents with “agent-ready” product data and content.
New channel mix for shopping “needs” and “wants”: While AI agents excel at the “logic” of shopping (for example price comparison and technical specs), social commerce and live shopping provide the "soul” – the discovery, entertainment, and trust that algorithms cannot manufacture. This means that consumers will use agents and AI tools like Gemini or chatGPT to buy the things they need. But for things consumers want, social and live experience play a more important role.
Context-driven product discovery with an AI agent: The way consumers search for products is becoming more context-driven. Instead of searching with product categories and filtering, consumers want to find products that fit their exact need and context: "I need a waterproof outfit for a week of hiking in Urho Kekkonen National Park next Tuesday. My budget is €400, and I prefer sustainable brands." Retailers need to consider how they can adapt and better serve their customers.
A clickless future: consumers have no reason to browse, compare, and click their way through webstores anymore. AI agents can handle the searching, comparing, and selecting all the way to the “order confirmed” message. How can retailers ensure that consumers choose them to make the purchase? The role of price, delivery times, services, and availability remain as important as before.
The change in consumer behavior means that retailers face some new challenges. The traditional ways of ensuring top-of-mind position when a customer is ready to buy aren’t enough anymore. It’s crucial to consider:
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Visibility in AI recommendations: Ensuring your products appear in the suggestions that AI agents provide to consumers.
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Potential cost of AI recommendations: Being featured may involve paid placements, sponsored listings, or other commercial models.
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The impact of Google’s Gemini integration in Chrome: Whether consumers will use integrated Gemini instead of a webstore’s own features while shopping.
Changing how your business is run: the autonomous retail engine
Running a retail business ultimately comes down to growing your sales of products and services to customers. What’s crucial is how agentic AI can actually help with merchandising, sales, and customer service. The answer is the creation of an autonomous retail engine, which helps retailers by integrating various business functions, such as:
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Offerings and assortments
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Pricing
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Channels
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Promotions and campaigns
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Personalization
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Customer service
What could this autonomous retail engine look like in practice:
Adjusting offerings in real time
For a start, AI can dynamically adjust offerings in real-time based on consumer demand and competitor activity. Most retailers face the situation where they’re selling the same products as many of their competitors, or their resellers if they’re a brand company. One effective way to outshine competition is to invest heavily in the overall customer experience and continually explore new services and concepts for differentiation.
Dynamic pricing
With agentic AI, pricing will become even more important as consumers are likely to buy known brands and products with the lowest overall price including shipping via the AI tools. One good potential is to think of alternatives and to do different pricing strategies for different channels (agentic commerce and AI tools being one channel). Dynamic and more personalized pricing are also even more available through agentic AI.
Enhancing channels with AI-enabled tools
Retail business is many times a combination of having your own channels (physical and/or digital) and also using external channels to extend sales in other locations and markets via marketplaces, partners, and affiliates. What agentic AI brings to this is the launch of new features that enable consumers to search, select, and complete the purchase from AI-enabled tools, for example OpenAI and Google ecosystems.
Quicker response with promotions and campaigns
Additionally, agentic AI changes the way promotions and campaigns are designed and run. For example, a sudden change in the weather typically boosts sales of specific clothes and apparel. Agentic AI can help take quicker actions to start campaigns and make sure the needed products are available.
More personalization
Personalization will also be affected in the era of agentic AI. Once linking behavioral data to the basic and transactional data (not saying that this is always easy, but should be the target) you have possibilities to start making more personalized actions. And yes, you don’t as a starting point need to always build separate AI agents but can rather use the embedded AI capabilities already found in many marketing automation and personalization platforms.
Better customer service
In terms of customer service, an autonomous retail engine powered by agentic AI goes beyond generic support. A customer service agent can be integrated so that the consumer can start a conversation in WhatsApp, pick it up in a webstore, and finish it in-store as an AI agent carries the full history and intent forward. Unlike in traditional use cases, where a customer is simply pointed to an FAQ link, agentic AI has the autonomy to execute. It can also turn customer service from a cost center into a high-speed resolution engine that allows humans to focus on the more complex cases.
Taken as a whole, the autonomous retail engine allows businesses to function with greater speed, precision, and efficiency, while also providing a better experience for customers.
Integrating agentic AI into your retail operations
To get into the game and future-proof business, retailers need to decide how and when to integrate agentic commerce protocols.
Right now, Google’s Unified Commerce Protocol (UCP) and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) provide the main ways to integrate digital commerce with AI tools and ecosystems. They’re not directly overlapping or competing protocols, but serve different purposes:
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ACP is more about how to enable AI tools to assist the user in finding and selecting the products and completing the purchase with the AI tools.
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UCP is more about a standardized way to enable checkout and transaction execution in the various consumer interfaces like Google search, shopping, and AI mode while also integrating with the systems of the sellers.
Hopefully this post gave you some food for thought. You don’t have to navigate the future of agentic AI in commerce alone. We’ll help you find the best way to use AI to suit your retail operations. Contact us to discuss more.
Written by Riku Kärkkäinen and Eveliina Salomaa.
Riku Kärkkäinen,
Business Area Lead, Vincit Commerce
