The conversation about agentic commerce is almost entirely focused on the wrong thing.
Open any retail publication and you’ll find articles about AI shopping agents disrupting ecommerce, reshaping online checkout, and threatening digital marketplaces. The framing is consistent: agentic commerce is a website problem, an ecommerce problem, a digital-first problem.
What you won’t find is anyone asking the more interesting question: what happens to physical stores when customers stop browsing websites altogether?
That’s the question this piece answers. Not because ecommerce doesn’t matter, but because the strategic implications for store networks are being missed entirely. If you’re responsible for hundreds or thousands of physical locations and wondering what all this AI talk actually means for your real estate, your teams, and your customer relationships, this is for you.
The answer, grounded in what’s already shipping today, may surprise you: agentic commerce doesn’t threaten physical retail. It elevates it.
What agentic commerce actually changes
Agentic commerce isn’t a buzzword. It describes something already happening: AI systems that browse, compare, negotiate, and complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf. During Cyber Week 2025, AI agents influenced $67 billion in global sales, representing 17% of all U.S. orders. ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout is live with Shopify merchants. Visa and Mastercard have completed pilot transactions with AI agents. This is not a 2030 story.
The shift is about where decisions happen, not whether they happen. Demand doesn’t disappear. Buying still occurs. What changes is the interface. The browsing, comparing, and persuading that used to happen on your website now happens inside a conversation between a customer and an AI agent. By the time a transaction reaches you, the decision is already made.
That’s a problem for anyone who invested heavily in digital experience. It’s an opportunity for anyone who owns physical space.
The website bypass problem
When an AI agent handles “find me running shoes under £150,” your customer never sees your homepage. They don’t scroll through your curated product pages. They don’t watch your brand film. They don’t experience the UX your team spent eighteen months refining.
To the agent, you become a data row: SKU, price, availability, reviews.
Capgemini found that 58% of consumers have already replaced traditional search engines with AI tools for product recommendations. McKinsey reports 44% of users who’ve tried AI-powered search now call it their primary source. The digital brand experience you built to win customers is increasingly invisible to the people you’re trying to reach.
Think about what this means in practice. All that investment in storytelling, in emotional design, in curated product discovery: the customer never encounters it. The agent doesn’t care about your brand film. It’s optimising for price, availability, and reviews.
Your brand story, your values, your service quality, your expertise: if a customer doesn’t visit your website before buying, they don’t encounter any of it digitally.
So where do they encounter your brand?
The store becomes the last unmediated brand surface
Here’s the implication nobody’s talking about: when AI agents handle discovery and transactions, your physical store becomes the only place customers experience your brand as a brand.
Not mediated by an algorithm. Not reduced to specifications. Not compressed into a comparison table.
The store is where customers feel your materials, see your team in action, and form impressions that no agent can replicate or summarise. In a world where digital interactions become invisible, human-facing environments matter more, not less.
This reframes the strategic conversation entirely. Stores aren’t legacy infrastructure waiting to be optimised away. They’re the singular place where differentiation, trust, and relationship actually live. If customers stop browsing your site before buying, the store is where your brand exists as more than a dataset.
Consider what stores can communicate that agents cannot: the quality of your service, the expertise of your staff, the atmosphere you’ve created, the care you take. These aren’t digital signals. They’re experienced in person or not at all.
That makes stores strategic. Expressive, not transactional. Critical to differentiation, not overhead to be managed down. BCG has warned that without intervention, retailers risk being “reduced to mere background utilities” in agent-controlled marketplaces. Stores are how you avoid that fate.
Trust becomes a machine-readable constraint
AI agents don’t make emotional decisions. They optimise for reliability, availability, verified reviews, and clear policies. When an agent evaluates options, it’s looking for signals that reduce risk for the customer it represents.
Physical presence is one of those signals.
A store you can walk into, a human you can speak with, a return you can make in person: these are hard trust signals that pure ecommerce struggles to match. Local accountability, visible inventory, and immediate recourse are not just customer preferences. They’re machine-readable constraints that influence how agents rank and recommend.
Think about what agents need to verify before recommending a purchase: Can this retailer actually deliver? What happens if something goes wrong? Is there recourse? Physical stores answer these questions in ways that purely digital competitors cannot. The store is proof that you exist, that you’re accountable, that there’s somewhere to go if the product isn’t right.
In an agent-driven world, trust becomes a selection criterion. Retailers with physical presence have something to offer that pure-play competitors cannot: certainty, recourse, and human support when things go wrong. And that advantage is structural.
Speed makes immediacy more valuable
Here’s a counterintuitive effect: as AI agents accelerate purchasing, waiting feels worse.
When decisions happen in seconds, tolerance for delay drops. The friction of shipping windows and delivery uncertainty becomes more noticeable, not less. Customers who are used to instant recommendations start expecting instant ownership.
Physical stores win structurally here. Same-day pickup, instant possession, easy exchanges, and human reassurance are competitive advantages that become more valuable as the rest of the purchase process speeds up.
Stores become the fastest path from decision to ownership.
Experience becomes the moat
When AI handles functional buying, human attention shifts.
Customers no longer need to browse your site to find what they want. That task is delegated. What remains is the question of why they should care. Why visit at all? Why engage with your brand beyond the transaction?
The answer is experience. Not just theatrical gimmicks or Instagram moments, but genuine value: the chance to learn something, to feel confident in a decision, to explore options with expert guidance, to be helped by someone who knows the product.
Physical store traffic declined 3.6% on Black Friday 2025, but industry analysts noted something important about the visits that did happen: they’d evolved from open-ended browsing to mission-based shopping. Customers arrived with specific goals researched via AI rather than wandering for inspiration. They came on purpose.
Stores evolve from places where people buy things to places where people go intentionally. Discovery becomes deliberate. The experience is the reason to show up. Stores answer the question agents cannot: why should I care about this brand beyond just a product?
The data shift nobody is preparing for
As agent usage grows, you lose something important: digital browsing signals.
The clickstreams, search queries, and page visits that power your marketing attribution and personalisation engines? They diminish when customers stop visiting your site. The data that feeds your CDP and drives your campaigns starts to thin out.
But customer insight doesn’t vanish. It moves to the store.
What customers try on, what they ask about, what they consider and reject: these signals now live in physical space. What customers try on, what they ask about, what they consider and reject: these signals now live in physical space. Retailers who can capture in-store behaviour, identity, and intent will maintain the customer understanding they need. Those who can’t will be flying blind.
This isn’t about installing cameras everywhere. It’s about recognising that stores have become your primary source of customer intelligence, not just a place where transactions happen.
Finally, amirite?
What this means for retail leaders in 2026
The strategic question isn’t just how to optimise for AI agents. It’s what role your stores play.
Stores can no longer be passive transaction points or brand billboards that exist mainly for awareness. They need to become trust anchors, experience hubs, and the infrastructure through which customer relationships are actually built. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the response to a structural shift in how customers find and choose products.
This requires rethinking store design, staff capabilities, and data capture. It means treating physical space as a strategic investment, not a cost centre to be rationalised. It means asking hard questions about what stores are for when transactions can happen anywhere.
The retailers who get this right will find that agentic commerce doesn’t threaten their store networks. It elevates them. When the digital layer becomes invisible to customers, stores become the last place where brands are truly experienced. How you choose to use this opportunity could change everything.
The window to act is open now.
- How do AI shopping agents decide which retailers to recommend?Agents optimize for risk reduction: accurate inventory data, clear return policies, verified reviews, competitive pricing, and reliable fulfillment. Structured product data (complete specs, real-time availability) and trust signals (physical presence, easy returns) improve your ranking. It's less about brand storytelling, more about operational credibility that agents can verify.
- Will AI shopping agents completely replace online shopping?No. Agents work best for functional purchases where specs, price, and availability drive decisions: replenishment, commodity goods, well-defined needs. High-consideration purchases, emotional buying, and discovery-driven shopping still involve human decision-making. The shift is about where routine transactions happen, not whether humans stay involved in meaningful ones.
- What's the difference between agentic commerce and conversational commerce?Conversational commerce is humans shopping via chat or voice - you're still deciding, just through a different interface. Agentic commerce is AI deciding on your behalf, with varying autonomy levels. The agent browses, compares, and potentially purchases without you reviewing every option. One changes the channel; the other changes who's in control.
- How should retailers prepare store teams for agentic commerce?Train staff to add value beyond what agents provide. Agents handle specs, price, and availability. Humans handle expertise, reassurance, and problem-solving. Staff should be able to answer "why this one?" and "will this work for my situation?" - questions customers arrive with after an agent narrows the options. Product knowledge and service confidence matter more than ever.
- How can retailers capture customer data in-store as digital browsing declines?The key is creating value-exchange touchpoints across the entire store journey. This means capturing intent and identity from the moment customers arrive: entrance touchpoints that recognize returning visitors, in-aisle interactions where customers access product information, and checkout moments that convert transactions into ongoing relationships. Progressive profiling builds understanding gradually. Platforms like refive provide this full-journey infrastructure.
