AI

Defining the role of agentic AI in the retail customer experience

It’s rare to go more than a day without industry insight or retailer news that doesn’t involve agentic AI. Despite its great potential to impact CX agentic AI is not a sure bet when it comes to customer satisfaction.

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August 10, 2026 by Judy Mottl — Editor: RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com, Connect Media

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There's no debate agentic AI is taking the retail industry, as well as consumers, by storm.

The tools are being used for shopping, especially among Gen Z shoppers eager to find the best deal, compare products and research.

Numerator's "2026 Visions Report" reveals a hefty number of consumers, 70%, are using AI in their personal lives and nearly half, 45%, are using it daily, according to a Bain & Company's Consumer Lab AI survey that also revealed most consumers trust Gen AI for research and 17% of online shoppers will start holiday shopping with an AI platform.

Awareness of AI platforms exceeds 80% across Gen Z, millennials and Gen X, with nearly 70% using Gen AI regularly.

Amazon has been a leader in spurring AI agentic shopping tools. In June the omnichannel retailers combined its Rufus online site assistant and its Alexa+ service to create "Alexa for Shopping," for its app and website. The tool is a personalized, agentic AI assistant. Customers can use Alexa for Shopping to ask questions directly in the main Amazon search bar, create personalized shopping guides for big purchases, get category and product insights in search results and on product pages, generate dynamic product comparisons, view up to a full year of price history, and automate deal-finding, cart-building and routine purchases based on personalized insights.

So there's no better time to take a deep dive on how agentic AI is taking root in the retail industry, what the impact will be, the importance of increasing consumer adoption and how agentic AI, when it goes bad, can pose a disastrous customer experience.

Retail Customer Experience reached out via an email interview to Matt Price, co-founder of Crescendo, an AI-native CX provider, to gain insight on everything agentic AI in retail. Price, who served as founding CEO, currently serves as a strategic advisor to the company's board.

Price spent more than a decade at Zendesk Labs, where he founded the company's European operation and led global marketing of products and strategic projects as SVP and executive leader. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at several software companies, and he has also served as an angel investor, advisor and board member to software-as-a-service companies.

Crescendo powers more than 500 AI deployments worldwide, with customers including Lovepop, Headspace, SQUIRE, Nothing Bundt Cakes and Grindr. The platform combines AI-native automation with the depth required to support modern customer experience teams. It is focused on helping organizations reduce complexity across fragmented CX environments, improve the speed and quality of customer interactions and create more adaptive systems that learn from every engagement.

Q. What do you expect the impact of Amazon's new agentic shopping assistant to be within the retail sector?

Price: Amazon's new agentic shopping assistant has made the idea of AI-driven shopping ubiquitous.

Amazon in particular has opted for a native (or captive) shopping assistant. Rather than handing over the control of the experience to a company like OpenAI, they're handling it all themselves. This is a new battlefront in the retail sector. Customers want a level of control, and for competing vendors, the fastest way to match this is to adapt their existing service agents.

Moving forward, this will be the standard. Thanks to the widespread availability of AI, customers increasingly expect these tools to be available everywhere. As a result, the efficiency and personalization these tools offer will be regarded as common rather than groundbreaking. It also makes AI accessible to nearly any vendor, which levels the playing field for businesses of all sizes, allowing the entire retail sector to embrace the benefits of agentic technology.

Q. In a broad sense, what do you see in terms of AI's impact on the retail shopping experience and what do you think the evolution will bring?

Price: AI has already had a massive impact on retail. People are using LLMs and agents to independently research their purchases, and even more are using built-in AI tools on shopping sites like Nordstrom to discover products in plain language.

Today's AI blends service and sales, making customer service proactive instead of reactive. These two functions were previously siloed, but now, they share a direct link between customer experience and driving revenue. For the first time, instead of being regarded as cost centers, CX initiatives have a key role in overall business expansion. At Crescendo, we're seeing this first-hand: this shift is directly increasing both customer engagement and sales, with chat-to-conversion rates reaching as high as 58%, roughly four times the industry standard.

Looking ahead, we will see even more personalization, with AI shopping agents gathering and storing context to develop customer profiles that allow for proactive engagement. By leveraging AI to turn routine interactions into impactful moments that drive sales, the overall retail shopping experience will become a continuous, intelligent conversation that unites everything from discovery to checkout to post-purchase support.

Q: How critical is the customer adoption of AI in retail shopping?

Price: Customers are already embracing AI, whether it's to their joy or chagrin. Its presence is unavoidable, and how people feel about it boils down entirely to their experience with it. Companies need to understand the needs and wants of their customers and apply AI in a way that expedites their requests, automates tasks, and predicts what they may want next. By identifying the root of the frustration causing customers to be hesitant about embracing AI, companies can tweak their automated solutions to ensure they're meeting customer expectations.

If the presence of AI creates more problems and irritation than it does solutions, that's when it will drive shoppers away.

Q. What is the impact of a poor AI assistant experience given how finicky consumers are becoming about bad experiences?

Price: A bad AI assistant experience can easily be a death sentence. For online shopping, there's a zero-tolerance approach to friction. Beyond just irritation, one interaction with bad AI can completely eliminate a customer's trust in a brand, sending them to a competitor instead. Implementing ineffective AI is actually worse than having no AI tool at all, because it tells customers that the brand is more concerned with cutting costs than protecting a positive shopping experience.

Q. What should retailers be aware of when developing AI tools related to the retail customer experience?

Price: People are extremely friction-intolerant, and consumer tools like ChatGPT are already raising expectations for quick and personalized digital experiences. But "bolt-on" AI bots are counterintuitive, because they can create even more frustration for the customer. Companies can't just apply a tool on top of their existing tech stack. AI needs to be implemented as a base layer that easily integrates with everything, from sales to customer service, so it doesn't lead to dreaded SaaS mess.

And, just like human employees, AI is constantly learning and evolving. There will never be a set-it-and-forget-it solution for retail brands looking to genuinely elevate their customer experience. All agentic shopping assistants need to undergo continuous improvement to ensure they maintain a consistent and thorough knowledge base of both the products and the customers.

Q. What is the role of human expertise in AI-native customer experiences?

Price: Humans are critical to AI success. AI applications are expanding daily. In the same way, customer needs are constantly changing. Without human expertise, there can't be a seamless customer experience.

Instead of using enhancements in autonomous technology to justify layoffs, organizations should instead implore employees to elevate their skillset, focusing their time and effort on nuanced situations that require deep empathy or advanced problem-solving. The human role should be embedded directly into the AI framework to ensure frictionless handoffs and allow real people to step in with all context to take the interaction across the finish line.

When humans and AI work together, they create a powerful feedback loop. AI handles the routine tasks so real people can focus on high-value relationship building while still helping to strengthen and refine the AI's automation and knowledge base.

Q: Why will trust determine the success of agentic shopping?

Price: Trust will determine the success of agentic shopping because no one will use it if it's not trustworthy. It's that simple.

Automation is often integrated for the brand's specific goals, not the customers'. It's great to incorporate AI to alleviate employee tasks or speed things up, but it won't truly be successful if it creates disjointed processes for the consumer. While retail companies are often focused on speed, the more important metric to customers is attention.

Brand trust is built when customers have confidence in the AI model to provide genuine solutions, offer value and insights (like predicting opportunities for assistance based on past behaviors and real-time context), or proactively flagging when errors occur to expedite conflict resolution. The presence of automation alone will not be successful if it doesn't meet these requirements.

About Judy Mottl

Judy Mottl is the editor of RetailCustomerExperience.com and DigitalSignageToday.com at Connect Media. She is an award-winning editor, reporter and blogger who has worked for top media for nearly four decades, including AOL, InformationWeek and Internet News, as well as for leading technology providers including HP. She’s written everything from breaking news to in-depth industry trends and reported on technology long before the internet arrived, including the debut of the first smartphone. When she's not sharing insights on digital signage deployments and trends in retail customer experience she's on the beach or watching the latest live murder trial.

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