For three decades, the web reshaped shopping. The next era belongs to the AI agents that are now searching, comparing, and—for an adventurous few—buying on our behalf. If history tells us anything, this shift won’t sideline retailers. They’ve adapted through the rise of D2C ecommerce and comparison-shopping platforms, and many will adapt again in the age of agentic AI. But winning in this new era requires retailers (and the brands they work with) to adapt to new ways consumers discover and purchase products, fundamentally reshaping how they design their digital and retail media experiences.
The enduring role of retailers
Despite the noise around AI and ensuing handwringing, certain truths in commerce haven’t changed: distribution (from fast shipping to in-store product experiences and easy returns), product curation, and consumer trust are still central to the shopping experience and not easily commoditized.
Ecommerce has transformed how people shop, yet offline sales remain the majority, a reminder that physical presence remains a strategic moat and that behaviors are slow to change.
Retail isn’t disappearing. AI isn’t the first major disruption to retail. Shopping comparison sites have created greater price transparency and competition, but retail.com web traffic has never been higher. People thought voice shopping would be a big disruptor, but it’s still on the fringes nearly 10 years later. Even as AI-driven shopping accelerates, stores will continue to do the heavy lifting for try-ons, returns, and inspiration—moments that build confidence in ways pure digital struggles to match. AI will certainly prove to be a disruptor, but for most consumers, AI agents will complement and improve their existing shopping behaviors, rather than wholesale replace them.
Retailers will continue to play a critical role curating trends and validating quality. With so many options available, shoppers seek curated experiences to narrow things down, to show them what’s trending, what new products they should try, and where they can try them. This curation of trends and quality still requires a human touch from a knowing hand. Beauty leaders like Sephora show how curated assortments, hands-on education, and experiential moments spark inspiration—and loyalty. Shoppers can buy makeup on generic marketplaces like Amazon or at the drugstore, but they choose to go to Sephora stores for the guided experience and to ensure the quality and authenticity of the products they purchase.
Authenticity and trust win. When shoppers face a wall of nearly‑identical SKUs online, trusted retailers act as quality signals. The retailers who succeed in the future will be those who harness AI to amplify that trust factor, pairing expansive catalogs with increasingly intelligent and tailored recommendation engines.
From carousels to conversations
Naturally, retailers are actively exploring how to integrate AI into their sites to enhance the customer experience, blending traditional shopping journeys with AI-enhanced discovery.
But the most forward-looking ones aren’t just adding AI on the backend, they’re building on top of their own first‑party signals—things like loyalty data, purchases, returns and reviews, and real-time availability. That context lets their assistants go deeper than a generic LLM while aligning with the journeys shoppers already trust. The result: size and fit guidance, store‑aware bundles, brand‑consistent tone, and margin‑appropriate suggestions that a generic model can’t reliably produce without that context.
It’s not an either-or scenario, though. Many shoppers will still follow traditional paths, so the key is to layer chat and natural language search alongside existing search/browse journeys. Retailers also need to achieve organic-feeling monetization, integrating brand-boosted placements inside LLM recommendations.
Strategic implications for retail media
Three key trends will define the next phase of retail media:
1: Retail media ad formats and placements will get a revamp. As retailers rethink their own ecommerce experiences to deliver more agentic and personalized experiences to shoppers, they will need to update their ad format and placement strategies to reflect this new customer experience. Search and category browsing pages, long the bread and butter of retail media, will become relatively less important as retailers look to speed up discovery-to-purchase with chat-like agentic experiences. Seamlessly integrating sponsored products into these personalized product recommendations and leveraging product detail page real estate for complementary product discovery and basket building will be critical to ensuring brands and sellers can continue to leverage retail media ads to drive incremental sales.
More immersive formats, like display and video, will need to evolve from fixed slots on the side or bottom of a page to natively integrated components of chat experiences or product detail page recommendations and content.
2: The technology that drives ads and organic content decisioning will further converge. Agentic commerce will dramatically accelerate the shift to more personalized shopping experiences on retailer sites. The days of one-size-fits-all category browsing and semantic search results will soon be in the past. In response, retailers will move away from using siloed technology and logic to deliver organic product recommendations and sponsored ads. Instead, retailers will apply common logic across both organic content and ads, delivering personalized experiences that blend optimization with retailer, brand, and shopper goals.
3: Retailers and brands will optimize experiences for agentic bots—not just human shoppers. As human shoppers increasingly turn to AI agents to do the leg work of finding and even purchasing products, retailers and brands will have to make their products optimally discoverable (and purchasable) by these agentic bots. Retailers will rethink their site experiences (similar to how publishers rethought content strategies to optimize to traditional semantic search engines like Google) and brands will adapt their advertising strategies to influence not just human shoppers, but AI agents as well.
Agentic retail media at Criteo
At Criteo, we’re building for the agentic future—a vision our Chief Product Officer and President, Performance Media shared in: Powering AI-Assisted and Agentic Commerce: Criteo’s Vision for the Next AI Era.
Our roadmap marries discovery and monetization in ways that feel helpful to people and accessible to bots, while giving brands a chance to be seen and retailers the levers to manage to the outcomes they care most about.
To that end, we’re evolving our ad tech stack to be more deeply compatible with agentic experiences:
- Integrating sponsored ads into a retailer’s own agentic, chat-like experiences
- Creating new systems that align the logic for organic products and ad supported products
- Enabling retailers to better manage trade-offs across product sales, ad revenue, and customer satisfaction with a combination of AI-based prediction models and flexible controls
- Exploring how all of this adapts to the distinct needs of human and agentic bot shoppers
Retailers will remain central to commerce but must now prepare for a world where AI agents are leading the shopping journey. The winning strategy is to elevate human experiences while optimizing for agents, and we’re committed to helping retailers achieve both.
