Agentic Commerce is Reshaping Retail – But Can it Cross the Storefront?

Every conversation I’ve had about agentic commerce in the last six months has been an e-commerce conversation.

The discussion is happening everywhere: at events like Stripe Sessions, in protocol initiatives like the Universal Commerce Protocol coalition, and across white papers, keynote presentations, and product announcements. All of it points in the same direction. Agents are about to participate in retail transactions in ways most of us could not have credibly described two years ago.

That work is real and important. But it stops at the front door of the store.

And for the retailers I spend the most time with, brands whose product is a promise about style, quality, creativity, or craft, the store is where the brand actually lives.

So the question I keep coming back to is the obvious one nobody seems to be asking yet: what about the store?

This isn’t the adoption curve we’ve seen before

Before getting to the store question, it’s worth pausing on the velocity at which change is moving because no one’s intuition is properly calibrated for it yet.

Anthropic grew revenue 80x in a single quarter. They had planned for only 10x. The number of their enterprise customers spending more than $1M a year on AI doubled in two months. Sixty percent of Americans used an AI chatbot last month, well above the number of people who read a newspaper. ChatGPT reached 100M users in two months. Mobile phones took 12 years to reach 50 million users.

None of those numbers are surprising on their own. Read them together, and the floor shifts a little.

This is the part that’s hardest for executive teams to internalize, including mine. Our intuition for technology adoption was calibrated in a world where things took years. Now, the decisions retailers make in 2026 about what their commerce infrastructure looks like will be lived with in a market that, by 2027, will not resemble the one we’re operating in today.

For commodities, agents are great. For brand-led retail, they’re a problem with a name.

If you’re a retailer selling toner cartridges or paper towels, an agent placing the order on a consumer’s behalf is probably a good thing. The transaction gets faster, more efficient, and more accurately matched to need. Nobody was emotionally invested in how their toner got purchased.

But if customers come to you because of what your brand stands for, not just what sits on the shelf, the agent in the middle creates a very different challenge. The value you’ve built is not just in the transaction itself. It’s in the experience around it.

Agentic commerce won’t kill brand-led retail through automation. It’ll do it through disintermediation, quietly, one transaction at a time.

An agent that completes the transaction without ever putting the customer in front of the brand has made the brand optional. Once that pattern repeats often enough, the brand becomes a logo on a box. The promise it carried gets flattened into a SKU and a price.

For commodity retailers, that’s a fine outcome. For retailers built around brand and experience, it slowly erodes the value that made the business worth building in the first place.

The store becomes the moment of confirmation

Here’s the part of this that I find most interesting, and that the e-commerce-centric conversation keeps missing.

For brand-led retailers, the store doesn’t fade in an agentic future. It becomes more important, not less. When agents handle discovery, comparison, and routine ordering, the store is where the brand earns the relationship. It becomes the place where a customer touches the product, meets someone who knows it, and walks out remembering not just what they bought but what it felt like to buy it.

Think about someone walking into a store to buy their first luxury watch. The one they’ve been saving for, researching, talking themselves into. Or a customer working with a stylist who remembers exactly what they bought the last three visits. An agent can replicate the transaction. It can’t replicate the experience.

Which means the question for brand-led retailers isn’t whether to participate in agentic commerce. It’s how to let agents handle the parts of the transaction that should be efficient while preserving the moments that should still feel personal, human, and distinctly tied to the brand.

What I keep coming back to

The agentic conversation hasn’t extended to stores yet. It will. It must. The retailers whose brand is their business can’t afford to ignore it.

In a few weeks, I’ll be giving the opening keynote at Endless Aisle in London on June 17. I’ll share where NewStore is landing on this shift, our view on what agentic commerce looks like when it extends into the storefront, and what it takes to build it without flattening the brand experience that makes the store matter in the first place.

If you’re working on this in your own business, or if the question lands somewhere you’ve been thinking, I’d genuinely like to hear how you’re approaching it.