Marketers are facing an uncertain time as consumers increasingly adopt AI agents in their shopping journeys. As machines act autonomously on behalf of customers, a wedge is being driven between retailers and consumers – undermining brands’ ability to nurture loyalty and build long-term relationships.
The disintermediation threat posed by this agentic AI trend is not trivial. McKinsey estimates that agents could orchestrate up to $5 trillion of spending globally by 2030. With fewer direct interactions, existing business models face disruption as discovery, comparison, and purchasing behaviour fundamentally changes. Retailers will be forced to adapt as the importance of any customer engagement becomes heightened.
In an agentic commerce model, consumers may no longer browse multiple retailer sites themselves as AI assistants increasingly shortlist, compare, and recommend products on their behalf.
Despite these threats from third-party agents, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI shopping tools, brands still have the advantage that they hold massive amounts of customer data. This can allow them to deliver higher levels of personalisation - now a vital component of customer engagement and retention.
In Amperity’s recent 2026 State of Personalization in Retail report, consumers were clear in saying they want fast, accurate and tailored communication from brands that genuinely understand their preferences.
The vast majority (83%) of consumers also said they value a personalised shopping experience with tailored offers and recommendations.
Real-time relevance will only grow in importance
When it comes to customer engagement generally, there is strong evidence to suggest that personalisation is where the battle for consumer retention will be won and lost in the future. Knowing when and where to contact customers with relevant, timely and accurate communication is a core requirement.
Real-time personalisation can directly lead to higher conversion rates:
- More than two-thirds (69%) of respondents say they would be more inclined to buy if a retailer adjusted its recommendations or offers while they browsed.
The research also found that younger generations are especially responsive to personalised marketing efforts:
- Nearly one-third (29%) of Gen Z shoppers also said they are “much more likely” to purchase when the offer feels personal – compared to only 14% of Baby Boomers.
For retailers, this genGen Z and Millennials represent the fastest growing market segment – according to research from Nielsen, Gen Z’s purchasing power will reach a massive $12 trillion by 2030.
They are also more likely to demonstrate omnichannel shopping behaviour.erational data should serve as a clear indicator of where they should focus their attention as agents grow in prevalence.
- Gen Z and Millennials represent the fastest growing market segment – according to research from Nielsen, Gen Z’s purchasing power will reach a massive $12 trillion by 2030.
- They are also more likely to demonstrate omnichannel shopping behaviour.
Nurturing loyalty in the era of AI
It’s also worth noting that, while agents are being used for product research and comparison, consumers remain split on whether they would trust autonomous agents to make purchasing decisions.
- Research by Bain & Company shows that shoppers are three times more likely to trust the retailers’ on-site agents over third party agents.
This is leaving retailers with an opportunity to embrace AI themselves to personalise customer experiences and nurture brand loyalty. The challenge for brands, however, is whether they have the capacity to deliver personalisation at scale.
Amperity’s research found that consumers are currently far more likely to receive impersonal communications from retailers – 79% said they commonly receive irrelevant, mistimed, or invasive messages.
To introduce real-time relevance and personalise experiences effectively, a brand’s AI agent must be able to see all of a customer's data within a unified profile. Customer information, however is often scattered across email platforms, ecommerce systems, in-store POS, apps, loyalty programmes, customer service, and more.
Enabling personalisation at scale
If customer data is not unified, agents will be working with fragmented, duplicated or stale customer records. This creates a real risk that they will send inappropriate or outdated messages.
Here are two examples of potential missteps that illustrate how trust can be eroded at a time when the ability to build relationships is being contested:
- If a high-value, loyal customer of some ten years suddenly decided to interact on a different channel, they could end up receiving a welcome offer.
- Alternatively, they may have just returned a product in store but, based on recent actions on an ecommerce channel, they could receive recommendations for the same item via email.
To avoid these miscues, a retailer’s agent might be trained to recognise a loyal shopper and instantly update the homepage with products in their size and preferred style. If a customer abandons a basket, the brand could follow up with a personalised offer within milliseconds, using what it knows about their shopping history. Each interaction feels timely, relevant and personal, turning engagement into conversion in real-time and deepening customer connections.
To ensure success, retailers must equip their agents to see the entire customer profile, wherever it resides, at any time. They also need to consolidate all information to prevent profile duplication across different channels.
This often requires AI-enabled identity resolution as consumers commonly use a variety of identifiers across different channels, such as abbreviated spellings of their own names and alternative email addresses.
Empowering real-time customer decisions
With unified customer profiles, retailers can then act on customer signals in the moment and create personalised interactions as they happen - instead of hours or days later. Agents can respond to each interaction, supported by an up-to-date profile and a full customer history.
This is providing retailers with a crucial advantage at a time when consumers are questioning whether they trust third party agents with their data. Customers are simply more comfortable with conversing with brands directly, and they increasingly expect brands to know them. The data shows that almost two thirds (63%) of consumers say their favourite companies are those that remember their preferences across all platforms.
Trust, speed, and customer context are becoming competitive differentiators in the age of AI intermediaries. With a strong data foundation, a retailer’s AI agents will be able to connect customer insight to actions in real-time.
Marketers can enable personalisation the moment intent is shown, while service and operations teams can anticipate needs, resolve issues faster, and deliver experiences that build loyalty.
