Retail Dive Trendline on How artificial intelligence is shaping retail

In 2026, retailers are placing bigger bets on agentic AI commerce — even at the risk of losing direct access to customers and control over their data.

Just in the first month of 2026, Etsy, Target and Walmart have continued their move to bring merchandise offerings onto external platforms by partnering with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot.

All three companies joined forces with OpenAI's ChatGPT last year to make products available for purchase on the platform. That's on top of the efforts by Amazon and Walmart to popularize the AI consumer-facing assistants they built, named Rufus and Sparky respectively.

The rapid evolution of agentic AI — and the shift it poses to direct consumer access — is likely game changing for the retail industry.

“I kind of think that this is going to shake up retail just like the internet did,” Kartik Hosanagar, marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told Retail Dive.

Retail executives agree, as many took to the stage in January at the National Retail Federation’s 2026 Big Show in New York City to discuss the impact of AI.

Industry leaders like Ulta Beauty CEO Kecia Steelman and REI CEO Mary Beth Laughton told audiences at the event that AI will likely impact every aspect of the business.

The argument for joining forces with the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini is that retailers want to meet their customers where they are. Walmart's CEO John Furner emphasized the sentiment while speaking at NRF.

AI-driven U.S. e-commerce traffic grew 758% year over year between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1, according to Adobe’s 2025 Holiday Shopping report. AI traffic to U.S. retail sites specifically on Cyber Monday increased 670%.

“What we expect is that consumers will deepen their engagement,” Katherine Black, a partner at Kearney leading food, drug and mass market retail, told Retail Dive via email. “More consumers will use it for shopping and for more types of shopping. As retailer capabilities become more prominent, that will encourage more usage as well.”

Meeting your customer where they’re at doesn’t necessarily come without a price, according to some industry experts.

Data ownership and the potential disintermediation of retailers are chief among the risks that external AI commerce poses to the industry in 2026.

Data and disintermediation

When a customer makes a purchase or casually peruses a retailer’s e-commerce site, a series of data points can be collected about their journey. Retailers can learn more about the needs and wants of a shopper by seeing what they searched for, which products they clicked to learn more about, how long they viewed each listing and more.

But what if that journey starts and ends within an external AI platform?

“It also shifts the locus of power,” Wharton’s Hosanagar told Retail Dive. “Whoever controls the agents now has the power.”

Deloitte’s 2026 Retail Industry Global Outlook found 81% of surveyed retail executives think generative AI will weaken brand loyalty by 2027.

On stage at the NRF conference, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai showcased a new suite of retailer commerce tools for its AI chatbot Gemini. 

The executive outlined how Gemini can take part in the customer journey, from discovery to decision and final purchase.

“He's talking about Google owning and collecting all of the data that happens around all three of those touch points,” Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy and product at retail technology provider Aptos, told Retail Dive. “And even if they share … if they're not sharing everything that happened that led to the discovery, that led to the decision, that led to the delivery, then the retailer loses so much context because it's outside of their realm.”

Pichai, however, insisted on stage that collaboration between Gemini and retailers was key.

“What we have learned from the last 27 years of working with retailers is that we only succeed together,” Pichai told the conference audience. “We want to use our full stack approach to help you shape this next chapter of retail.”

Risk goes beyond the potential loss of data about consumers, however. 

“The risk is that as these systems start to offer instant checkout and so on, I am doing all of my product research, discovery, understanding, including purchase not on Walmart's website, but on OpenAI's website,” Hosanagar said. “You're giving away the customer interactions, the brand experience, all of that, and then you become like a fulfillment company.”

This may be why Amazon — which has not yet announced any plans to sell its products on ChatGPT like competing retailers — has put so much effort into its own agent initiatives, Hosanagar added. 

The e-commerce giant this month debuted a dedicated website for its generative AI-powered Alexa+ assistant meant to help users research and plan out purchases conversationally. 

Still, participation in external AI platforms’ commerce initiatives may be a necessity and less of a choice moving forward. 

When OpenAI debuted its Instant Checkout shopping feature on ChatGPT in September, the company noted that the functionality could impact result rankings for queries. The tech company said it considers several factors — including the enablement of Instant Checkout, quality and price — when ranking merchants that sell the same product.

Looking at Walmart’s decisions, the company is hedging its bets by hopping onto external agentic commerce and aiming to become the retailer of choice on the new channel, according to Hosanager. 

“I don't see a retailer building their own agentic platform as a way to avoid participating in the agentic platforms,” Kearney’s Black added. “And of course, they would love for consumers to go to their brand directly and shop. But in reality, I think most retailers realize that there's a trend moving to these multi-retailer agents and so they have to be relevant in that space.”

Bringing product catalogs to AI chat platforms is just the beginning of the potential change to come in a customer’s shopping journey.

Early innings

About half of retail executives anticipate the collapse of the current multistep customer shopping journey by 2027 as the process shifts to a singular single AI-driven interaction, per Deloitte’s report.

The industry is just in the early stages of seeing e-commerce evolve with agentic AI, according to Hosanager.

“Where it gets interesting is where the buyer is actually using an agent to do the shopping, versus going to Gemini or going to ChatGPT and interacting with that system,” he said. 

For a frequent flyer who travels regularly for work, as an example, the future of agentic commerce may become more streamlined. An AI agent could learn the users preferences — such as preferred airlines and times of day — and proactively research the available flights that fit those needs. The AI agent could make the flight purchase on a customer’s behalf automatically, book applicable hotel accommodations and check the weather to help inform packing decisions — all without the user even opening the AI chat platform to get this process started. 

In the future, this scenario could play out between AI agents, where the user’s agent is interacting with an AI agent from the airline, for example.

A similar situation could play out in the world of retail, Hosanagar noted, and that could mean a drastic shift in how businesses interact with customers.

“For the retailer, you are increasingly going to interact with the end customer less and less, and you're interacting with their representative, which is the AI agent, which is now a new class of customer,” he said. “ It evaluates information differently. It needs information presented in a different format in order to understand it well. It can be persuaded, but it's persuaded differently than how you persuade humans.”

AI agents can also play a role in how customers shop in stores, according to Aptos’ Baird.

When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, retailers dealt with a massive change in how customers shopped in stores, Baird said. Consumers were searching online to check product reviews and competitors pricing while standing in store aisles.

Customers are now able to access the intelligence of ChatGPT right from their phones, which is providing more researched and instantaneous insights to them.

“It's not that you have the whole world wide web at your disposal while you're standing in the store,” Baird said. “It's that you have a store associate who's an expert in all stores.”

The moment may call for equipping employees with their own AI technology in stores so they can get instant insights about a customer they’re interacting with, such as their clothing preferences or whether or not they’re a frequent product returner. 

Or a retailer’s own AI agent could proactively reach out to customers on behalf of a store associate to inform the consumer when a product they like is back in stock at the location, encouraging a sale.

“The point is to let the store associates shine,” Baird added.