What Happens to Stores When AI Agents Do the Shopping?

Fifty years ago, Susan was one of more than a hundred million Americans who drove to a shopping mall an average of once a week to buy things. By 1976, a third of all retail sales happened at the mall.

Susan shopped exactly the way the mall designers intended. The department store anchors were the magnets motivating her to make the trip in the first place. The smaller shops lining the corridors between them turned her walk from point A to point B into a series of serendipitous purchases that kept the whole ecosystem humming, including a stop or two at the food court to grab lunch or dinner.

Fifty years before that, Susan’s grandmom was one of the millions who found the lure of the department store irresistible. A New York Times article published on February 2, 1927 cited Federal Reserve data showing department store sales setting new retail records in 1926. (If you do happen to click on the article link, check out the ad for life insurance on the same page.)

For the first time, curated retail items could be found under one roof for granny to touch, feel and try on. Knowledgeable salespeople demonstrated products and answered questions, turning store browsers into buyers. Stores offered credit to make buying easier, and retail sales took off. And like shopping at the mall, going to the department store was an experience that was part social, part shopping, but mostly lots of fun.

Julie Satow’s book When Women Ran Fifth Avenue documents the role department stores played in shaping commerce and influencing fashion in their heyday. It’s a great read.

Today, Susan’s granddaughter, Ellie, starts her shopping trip with a scroll.

Her smartphone and apps give her access to the equivalent of every mall and every department store ever built with a tap and a swipe. PYMNTS Intelligence data shows that nearly two-thirds of American consumers start their shopping trips that way, making purchases 12 days each month on average and window shopping for another 12. For retailers, this is pretty good news. Mobile window shoppers convert to a purchase at a rate three times higher than the casual mobile phone user. Younger consumers and parents skew that number even higher.

Read More: The 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index: The Rise of the Mobile Window Shopper and What It Means for Payments

The digital world gives Ellie tons of options to buy whatever strikes her fancy without ever visiting a store. She has certainty about product quality and inventory availability even if she decides to make the trip just to see the item for herself. If she doesn’t, the logistics of getting her items delivered are transparent, predictable and efficient.

The latest PYMNTS Intelligence data finds that 48% of clothing and accessories, 61% of electronics purchases and 75% of sporting goods and hobby purchases made online now happen at Amazon. Overall, almost two in every ten retail purchases now starts and ends online.

Read More: Walmart Aims at Closing Amazon Online Sales Gap

But Ellie’s generation may be the last to make even that digital journey themselves.

Do Consumers Still Want to Shop at a Store?

Warren Buffett said in a 1977 Wall Street Journal interview that the best business to own is a toll bridge. His thesis: Once capital is invested to build one, you can keep collecting revenue and raising prices since you control access to the places people want to go.

If you can’t be the destination and monetize it, the next best thing is to own the metaphorical bridge everyone has to cross to get to one. Platforms are a great example of the art and science of being a massively successful toll booth. Or a complete disaster, if you get the platform economics wrong.

Buffett’s aphorism is particularly appropriate to shopping in an age of AI agents.

The retail industry is in the throes of a heated debate about whether to open storefronts to AI models so that consumers (or their agents) who start their product journeys there can find their merchandise and buy. That’s the OpenAI, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Perplexity, Shopify, Google, PayPal and Walmart thesis.

Read More: Department Stores of the Future Are AI Agents

The other side of the argument: if you’re already the destination, what’s the point of the bridge? If consumers already come to you to search, discover, compare and buy, then connecting to someone else’s toll bridge is not in your best interest. As the destination, you’re the bridge and the toll booth all wrapped up into one. That’s the Amazon and eBay thesis. (Amazon, I get. eBay is the ultimate head-scratcher, if you ask me.)

But there’s a more fundamental question at the heart of this issue even before getting to the strategic question of open versus closed.

In a world where agents can buy, do consumers still want to shop at a store?

Will Ellie, her kids or her grandkids need to start at “the store” in order to gather product information, read reviews, evaluate options and decide what, when and whether to buy so that they will have confidence the order will be right and show up on time? If so, consumers won’t be willing to fully delegate to an agent because too much can go wrong.

Or will shopping, as we know it, shift from stores and apps to a collection of hundreds of billions of digital SKUs that agents shop and buy on a consumer’s behalf? In that scenario, consumers say shopping across endless aisles and multiple drives to physical stores is too much of a hassle. Agents can do it smarter and more efficiently.

This turns out to be the $5.5 trillion question for retail in the U.S.

Because if AI agents do the shopping, nobody (or many millions of nobodies) will “go” anywhere. Instead, shopping’s theoretical bridge leads to another bridge and another bridge and another with their own tollbooths.

The destination that was once the store becomes irrelevant because it becomes invisible. The new destination becomes the prompt and the agent dispatched to do the shopping and buying. The bridges and the tollbooths connect to and from this new agentic storefront.

The Shift That’s Already Here, Sort Of

The data says this isn’t so much of a theoretical debate anymore.

PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that more than six in ten U.S. consumers used AI in the past year to do something. More than a third of Gen Z consumers and power users now start their daily tasks on dedicated AI platforms first, including content discovery. And not in addition to Google search, but as a replacement.

As of January 2026, not only have 41% of consumers used dedicated AI platforms for product discovery, but 33% say they have fully replaced their prior methods. They’re not layering AI on top of old habits. They’re shutting the door and leaving them behind.

Read More: Smart Agents Replace Super Apps

This behavior is more predominant among the early adopters who are all in on AI and agents, with 51% having replaced their old methods of product discovery. True to their early adopter roots, they are willing to tolerate untold friction to try something new. Among AI power users, the 24 million Americans who use AI and agents to do everything from building shopping lists to doing research on what stocks to buy, the share who reported replacing their previous search and discovery methods continues to increase since November 2025, when it stood at 46%.

For them, the front door of commerce is already in motion.

But here’s the caveat.

The growth is being driven overwhelmingly by use cases that are not yet letting agents make high-stakes, complex purchasing decisions on their behalf.

In part that’s because the inventory of products and merchants to shop remains nascent. In part it’s because the experience is largely circa the early days of internet commerce: functional, but not exactly one-click amazing. And mostly it’s because consumers still have to trust that their purchase discovery and outcomes are as good as the content discovery and outcomes when the starting point is the physical or virtual store.

For the moment, the interest in doing these things is higher than the reality of actually doing them.

And yet about 82% of these power users, who are the most likely to have replaced their old discovery methods, say they would use AI agents for big, complex purchases where the stakes are high and getting it wrong has financial consequences. These are not impulse or everyday buys. They are the high-consideration, high-research decisions that used to take hours, even days or weeks. And where a lot of spend hangs in the balance.

That’s consumer intent at the very leading edge of AI and agents. And it’s pointed directly at the heart of how retail works today.

Why Shopping is Not a One-Size Fits All Experience

The mistake in the current debate about agents versus stores is treating “shopping” as a one-size fits all activity. It isn’t. There are several distinct reasons for how, why, when and where people buy. And the relevance of AI agents will vary tremendously based on those buying triggers.

Take replenishment, AKA subscriptions.

The dog food. Laundry detergent. Paper towels. Toothpaste. The purchases where the consumer made the real decision once, maybe even years ago, and has been on autopilot ever since. There’s no discovery here. No joy. Just the mild annoyance of remembering to place an order before it runs out. And the catastrophe of running out when they forget something important.

This is where an AI agent doesn’t just help, it can take over entirely and reinvent the subscription experience along the way.

No more boxes of paper towels that pile up in the basement because someone in the household forgot to pause an order. Instead, an agent can notice and nudge.

“It’s been six weeks since you ordered dog food. Time to reorder?” “You haven’t refreshed your white short-sleeve t-shirts for the summer. Want the same ones you bought last year, or take a look at the five most popular styles in your size?” “Time for new flip flops. Same pair as last June, or want to see what’s out there?”

In truth, consumers don’t want to spend their time shopping for these things. They want the buying process to disappear. That’s what the agent can do, with a prompt and one-tap confirmation.

Read More: Why 30 Million US Consumers No Longer Search

Amazon already does a version of this with Subscribe & Save, which I live by. Alexa+ attempts to take it further by adding context, knowing that summer is coming, that the dog food bag lasts roughly this many weeks, that last year’s flip flops ran a half-size too small because of a return and a reorder.

Early access data from Amazon on Alexa+ finds that users tripled their shopping activity and had two to three times more conversations compared to the original Alexa. Amazon made Alexa+ fully available to all U.S. users this month (February 2026), and it’s free for its 250 million Prime members. That’s a lot of people who already live with an agent on their kitchen counter or inside an Amazon app.

Walmart’s play with its One Pay banking, credit, shopping and rewards app tries to capture a piece of this layer by turning the grocery trip into a financial flywheel that expands into replenishment. It remains an aspirational goal. Walmart’s ecommerce business has seen strong growth over the last year (from 16.4% to 19.9%), with much of that growth coming from groceries, which drive nearly 60% of their sales. Its Subscribe and Save service, which launched in 2023, is positioned as a counter to Amazon’s in capturing recurring sales for groceries and essentials.

In an agentic world, whoever owns this layer owns the most frequent, most predictable and most invisible transactions in a consumer’s life.

Then there are the bigger-ticket, once-every-so-often, more considered purchases.

A new camping tent. A stroller. A laptop. A dishwasher. A new car. These are the decisions where people currently spend hours reading reviews, comparing specs, toggling between browser tabs and going back and forth over whether the extra hundred dollars is worth it. And this is exactly the layer where the PYMNTS Intelligence data gets most interesting. It’s precisely these complex, high-stakes decisions where consumers are most eager to hand the tedious task of evaluation those options to AI.

Read More: From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce

It makes sense. Typing in (or speaking) a detailed prompt is just easier than scrolling through forty-seven open tabs. A consumer can describe what they need in plain language and the agent does in seconds what used to eat up an entire afternoon or more.

Amazon’s Rufus is the most visible example of what this looks like inside a closed ecosystem. The numbers Amazon reports tell you why Amazon is pushing so hard on it.

They report that some 250 million shoppers used Rufus in 2025, with monthly active users growing 140% year over year. Amazon says it’s on pace to drive more than $10 billion in incremental annualized sales with it. Rufus users are 60% more likely to complete a purchase than non-Rufus shoppers. During Black Friday 2025, sessions involving Rufus that ended in a purchase doubled compared to the trailing thirty-day average, while non-AI sessions grew just 20%, they say. That doesn’t feel like a marginal improvement. It suggests that a fundamentally different shopping behavior is happening inside its ecosystem.

Then there are the LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini that want to be the destination where that journey starts and ends, routing consumers to the right merchant with the right product at the right price. It’s also where the strategic tension begins to get, well, a little tense.

Read More: Why the ‘Person’ of the Year in 2025 Should Be the Chatbot

Amazon can end the shopping journey because it owns what I’d call logistics certainty. A consumer knows when the product is arriving: same hour, same day, next day. They know what the shipping costs are: mostly free with Amazon Prime, which is a bonus and eliminates the uncertainty of not knowing the final cost. A consumer knows how to return an item if there’s a problem. And where to do it for free. The entire post-decision experience is part of their destination’s appeal.

Perhaps one of the most underrated variables in the entire agentic commerce debate: What exactly happens once an agent clicks “buy.”

Then there are the highly complex, product/service blended purchases that support some of life’s biggest moments.

The 25th anniversary trip. Having a baby. Sending a kid to college. Buying a first house. Getting a puppy. Planning a wedding. Moving to a new city. Each of these involves dozens of purchases, but none of them is really about filling a cart. They are about making a life passage happen.

It’s also where the question of whether consumers still want to go to stores gets interesting. The answer might be yes, but in a different way than it happens today.

Nobody wants to spend a week researching car seats, strollers, nursery furniture, baby monitors, bottle warmers and the thirty-five other things your friends, relatives and in-laws insist you absolutely must have before the baby arrives. Then there’s the physical infrastructure necessary to support the baby. The diaper service. The pediatrician. The day care. The preschool. It’s exhausting, often contradictory and largely anxiety-producing.

The agent’s role in these moments isn’t to shop for those parents. It’s to be the smart and efficient concierge that helps to simplify the massive complexity around this important life moment.

Today preparing for the new baby (or any of life’s biggest moments) looks like parallel processing: researching across endless tabs, juggling competing recommendations, stitching together a plan from fragments.

Tomorrow it might look like this.

Congratulations! You’re having a baby! Here’s a curated registry across eight retailers based on your budget, your house or apartment size, and what parents with similar lifestyles actually used and loved. Here are the retailers that have most of these items in stock if you want to go in and check them out IRL. Here are the three pediatricians near you accepting new patients with strong reviews. Here’s a timeline of what to buy to avoid the panic-ordering purchase of any car seat in stock at 2 a.m. three days before the due date.

The agent handles the things that take time and create frustration. The hassle of research, comparison and logistics coordination is stripped away, and what’s left is the part that actually matters to people. The choosing, experiencing and satisfaction of making a good decision in the context of something very important about to happen.

Who Plays Where and Why It Matters

So, who owns the toll bridge and who becomes the destination? That depends on which version of shopping you’re talking about. And the four most consequential players in this space, Amazon, Google, Walmart and the LLM platforms, are each building from very different starting positions.

Amazon: The Everything Store wants to become the Everything Concierge.

Amazon pulls in roughly 2.5 billion visits a month to its site, commands roughly 9.1% of all U.S. retail spending according to the latest PYMNTS Intelligence report, serves more than 300 million active customers, with 250 million-plus Prime members locked into an ecosystem that has become the defacto starting point for product purchases. Amazon reported Q4 2025 revenue hit $213 billion, up 14% year over year. These are not the numbers of a company that needs to reinvent itself. These are the numbers of a company that can afford to make big bets from a position of massive retail strength.

That appears to be what Amazon is doing.

Subscribe & Save handles replenishment. Alexa+ is hoping to extend that by contextualizing it, learning the consumer’s purchase velocity, anticipating what they need before they think of it and eventually ordering ahead of time with its auto-buy feature.

For more considered purchases, Amazon has built the perhaps most complete environment in retail: search, reviews, product information, price comparison, and then the killer, logistics certainty, all in a one-stop shop. Consumers start and end the journey on Amazon and reliably know that the product will arrive when promised. Rufus and Help Me Decide don’t replace the shopping journey, but instead compress it.

And at a nearly 10% advertising conversion rate, roughly five times Google Shopping’s rate, the math for brands selling on Amazon is hard to argue with.

Amazon’s bigger bet with Alexa+ is to push beyond shopping and into life. The ambition is not to be just a shopping assistant but a life operating system.

Alexa+ already integrates with Uber, Grubhub, Ticketmaster, Vagaro for spa and fitness, Thumbtack for home services, Square for merchant services, Expedia for travel, Yelp for local discovery, and Amazon Autos for car sales. Amazon’s Panos Panay has described a vision where Alexa becomes the consumer’s personal shopper, butler and home manager. The more she understands about the consumer’s life, the better she can serve the customer.

Add Amazon’s healthcare play through One Medical and pharmacy, its grocery infrastructure through Whole Foods, Fresh, and the Uber Eats delivery partnership, Prime Video for entertainment, and Alexa embedded in hundreds of millions of homes, and you start to see the outlines of a company that could plausibly become the life concierge, not just the destination as the store. What we once called the Super App.

Here’s the catch. Amazon may make more trips to my home in a week than I’d like to admit, but Alexa+ still has a long way to go, at least in my experience, before she can live up to the claim of a personal assistant. She is what most consumers say they’d trust, according to PYMNTS Intelligence data. For me, it’s a crap shoot as to whether she can reliably turn on Bloomberg TV in the morning on my Fire TV, never mind organizing my day-to-day.

The conundrum is that Amazon is trusted today for efficiency, reliability and price. But no one is thinking of Amazon curating their wedding registry. The Everything Store may struggle to become the Everything Concierge precisely because life moments require warmth and judgment that an efficiency machine may not inspire. And Alexa+ hasn’t proven she can deliver.

Then there’s Google, which is playing a fundamentally different game.

Google is a massive advertising machine that generated more $400 billion in revenue in 2025, with advertising driving the lion’s share of those numbers. Google says its Shopping Ads drive 76% of all retail search ad spending. Google is, by a wide margin, the world’s largest digital advertising platform.

But Google’s position in commerce is that it is really nowhere. It’s always been the bridge, never the destination. Consumers search on Google, discover products, and then leave to buy somewhere else. Google gets paid for the referral.

That’s what Google is trying to change.

In January 2026, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, an open standard designed to let AI agents navigate the full shopping journey from discovery through checkout, all within Google’s own ecosystem. Google co-developed UCP with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and got endorsements from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, American Express and Best Buy. The message was clear.

Google wants to stop being the bridge and become the destination.

Read More: The Protocol Power Struggle Reshaping AI-Driven Commerce

This announcement came shortly after Google rolled out agentic checkout in November 2025, letting users set a target price and authorize Google to auto-purchase via Google Pay when the price drops. Its Shopping Graph now indexes more than 50 billion product listings, with 2 billion updated every hour. The new Business Agent feature lets retailers like Lowe’s, Michaels, Poshmark, and Reebok deploy branded AI assistants directly inside Google Search to chat with shoppers and close sales. Direct Offers, a new ad pilot, offers exclusive discounts to high-intent shoppers in AI Mode.

It’s nothing if not ambitious. But Google’s challenge remains closing the gap between intent and conversion by turning itself into the internet’s marketplace.

Google Shopping Ads convert at roughly 1.91%. Amazon’s marketplace converts at nearly 10%. That’s a five-to-one ratio, and it tells you everything about the difference between a platform where people go to browse and a platform where people go to buy.

Open standards and broad retailer partnerships are a compelling pitch, but until more shoppers are completing purchases inside Google rather than clicking away to finish somewhere else, the toll bridge metaphor still holds. And merchants need to consider how much, and when, to put effort into exposing their entire product catalog to Google, without a clear understanding of how it plans to monetize those sales. And who owns the customer relationship. More on that point later.

Walmart is the wildcard with one truly irreplaceable asset: its physical storefront.

Roughly 100 million people walk into Walmart for the most frequent, most habitual, most non-discretionary purchase in retail: their groceries. That foot traffic is massive. But it’s also their greatest Achilles’ Heel.

Few people who go to Walmart for groceries buy anything else. The foot traffic is enormous, but their slice of the retail basket is narrow. PYMNTS Intelligence data shows Walmart’s share of retail declining in nearly every category except food.

Walmart’s AI strategy seems two-fold. With its AI partnerships, Walmart appears comfortable being a destination where the LLM toll bridges send traffic because its physical infrastructure is something no AI platform can replicate. And digital is where they lack meaningful share.

Physically, the One Pay credit and rewards play is an attempt to expand what the in-store shopper buys — to turn a grocery trip into a broader financial relationship. If you are already in the store buying food and the Walmart app knows you need new school supplies for your 10-year old,  it can offer you credit and rewards to buy them right then, and might expand the basket. It’s a theory, for now.

Like Amazon, the challenge for Walmart is in playing the life concierge role.

Walmart is not a lifestyle brand. It is not where a consumer goes to curate their baby registry or furnish their first apartment or plan their wedding. It is not a Super App.  Unless Walmart can leap from “where I buy groceries” to “where my Walmart agent manages my life,” it remains powerful but confined to a single, if highly defensible, position as the world’s biggest grocery store. With a little retail eCommerce on the side.

And then there are the LLM platforms that are building the toll bridges that want to own the road. And become the destination.

Consumers are increasingly starting their discovery journeys on these platforms, and the agents can route them to any merchant. That brings with it enormous disintermediation power. The PYMNTS Intelligence data confirms it. Consumers are replacing traditional search and discovery methods with AI-first approaches, and the replacement rate is accelerating.

Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to retail sites surged 693% during the 2025 holiday season, and shoppers arriving from AI services were 38% more likely to convert. This sounds amazing. But transaction volume is miniscule; this is still very early days.

OpenAI has already launched its own Instant Checkout feature. Microsoft Copilot is partnering with Shopify for embedded checkout. Perplexity was the first to launch one-click checkout within its app. Everyone wants in on commerce.

But the LLMs have a structural vulnerability that the current hype obscures. They have no logistics. They can send you to a store, but they cannot guarantee when the product arrives, what shipping costs, or how returns work. Every merchant on the other side of their toll bridge is a different experience with a different uncertainty profile. And the selection of those merchants is pretty limited right now.

Being discoverable by an agent does not solve the fulfillment gap. And that is why Amazon’s position is structurally stronger than the LLM toll bridge position, at least for now. Amazon is the one destination where the post-agent experience is already solved.

My sense is that the LLMs’ real aspiration is the life concierge.

Not to sell you things, but to be the agent that manages complexity across your entire life.

Getting a puppy? It finds the vet, orders the food, finds and books the trainer and the dog walker,  schedules the groomer, arranges for doggie daycare and the transportation to and from. The LLM becomes the relationship layer. Merchants, including Amazon, become the inventory.

Their advantage is being platform agnostic, smart and a massive time saver. The disadvantage is that a concierge without logistics and without fulfillment is ultimately dependent on others to deliver. And without access to all of the right products, creates buyer uncertainty.

In a world where the uncertainty tax on fulfillment determines which agent recommendation the consumer actually trusts, that dependency may be the LLMs’ defining limitation.

And  why “just open your storefront to the AI agents” is not the simple answer it appears to be for merchants.

Who Owns the Relationship When No One Goes Shopping Anymore?

Let’s close with how we started. The destination and bridge/toll booth metaphor assumed a world with fixed destinations and fixed paths to get to and from. The destination was valuable because there were a finite number of destinations, and lots of  people wanted to get there. There were only a few ways to  get in and out. The bridge was valuable because it made the trip possible. And people and businesses paid the tolls.

The agentic world makes the destination and the bridges with tollbooths pretty fluid. For the replenishment shopping example, the destination is invisible, handled by an agent on autopilot that noticed a consumer was running low before they did.

For considered purchases, the destination is whoever collapses the research journey fastest while maintaining the certainty that the product will arrive when promised and can be returned if it’s wrong.

For life moments, the destination is wherever the people feel a connection and a sense of trust to start the conversation.

The real strategic question comes down to how consumers view the shopping experience for each of those use cases.

Do they want an agent that makes shopping disappear? Or do they want an agent that makes the shopping experience at a store they know and trust  better?

The answer, almost certainly, is both. The company that figures out how to deliver both will own the most valuable thing in commerce.

Not the product, not the price, not the storefront, and not the toll bridge.

The relationship. The real starting point of any shopping journey.

Until NEXT time.

Join the 19,000 subscribers who’ve already said yes to what’s NEXT.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider.

She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.