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Sam Cane
VP of Experience
The next phase is orchestration.
That sounds like another tech buzzword, but for a customer, it actually feels like something very simple: they feel recognised.
Retail has always aspired to this. Think about your favorite local shopkeeper. They know your name, they remember what you bought last week, and they know your style. You don't have to explain yourself every time you walk through the door. That’s the "gold standard" of retail, but it’s always been impossible to do that at scale.
Until now.
Continuous Customer Journeys: Ending the "Reset" Button in Retail
Customers move between social media, email, websites, physical stores, and messaging platforms constantly. Typically, every one of those interactions has been a "reset" - a new session, a new journey, and a new explanation of what you're looking for.
Agentic orchestration changes that dynamic. Information carries forward, conversations continue, and context builds over time. It makes the whole experience feel like one continuous story rather than a bunch of disconnected moments.
That consistency, more than any individual feature, is what customers actually begin to value.
Conversational Commerce: Why Customers Value Conversations Over Channels
Retail has spent a long time talking about "multichannel," "omnichannel," and now "unified commerce." But in reality, those terms reflect internal business structures more than customer reality.
Customers don’t think in channels - they think in conversations. A marketing email becomes a question; a store visit becomes online research; a messaging interaction becomes a purchase.
What agentic AI helps with is the ability to maintain that two-way conversation no matter the touchpoint. The future of retail is less about being "omnichannel" and more about being omnipresent - just being there with the right answer whenever and wherever the customer needs it.
Intent-Driven Design: Using AI to Predict and Meet Customer Needs
Today’s digital experiences are often designed to support an entire journey at once, with discovery, purchase, and support all sitting in the same environment. But customers rarely need all of that at the same time.
The next evolution of experience design is intent-driven. If a customer is researching, the experience should educate. If they’re ready to purchase, it should remove friction. AI enables experiences that adapt to these needs rather than forcing customers through a predefined path. The result is an experience that feels quieter, more relevant, and much more efficient.
From Virtual Try-On to Real-World Context: The Power of Visual AI
Shopping has always been both visual and conversational.
Advances in generative AI mean customers can increasingly visualise products in their own context, including how something looks in their home, on their body, or alongside existing purchases.
At the same time, customer context is becoming richer. Preferences, environments, and past behaviours inform recommendations that feel practical rather than promotional. The goal isn't to restrict choice, but to provide rationale. Trust grows when AI feels transparent and explains why something is being recommended, rather than feeling mysterious or "black box."
The New Competitive Advantage: AI-Driven Experience as a Brand Differentiator
As these agentic capabilities become more common, the technology itself stops being the advantage.
Experience becomes the real differentiator.
The retailers who succeed won't simply deploy new AI tools. They’ll rethink how experiences connect and how customers feel seen across every interaction. In many ways, this is retail returning to its roots - providing that personal, shopkeeper-level service, just at a scale we never thought possible.
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