Agentic AI will continue to dominate retail in 2026. Brands and retailers will obsess over how they show up on platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity—because if AI can’t recommend your items, you may not exist for shoppers.
Just as retailers had to adapt to two-day shipping, then one-hour pickup, now they’ll need to offer AI-powered shopping experiences that feel as natural as chatting with ChatGPT.
Agentic AI will continue to be a talking point in 2026 because companies from Walmart to Google will be invested in it. Experts who spoke with Retail Brew said the next 12 months will lead to refinement of the AI tools that retailers rushed to launch in 2025. That’s because a lot of these new features will get better over time as more users engage with them. EMarketer projects AI driven e-commerce sales will account for 5% of overall online shopping in 2026.
“We anticipate 2026 to be a hockey stick year in terms of adoption of agentic AI,” Kassi Socha, senior director analyst of marketing at Gartner, told Retail Brew. “[2026] will be a building year, a building of inputs, a continued strengthening of content and experiences and actual adoption, not just announcements of agentic AI.”
“Consumers will be exposed to agentic at every touchpoint,” she added. “They’ll walk into stores and have the opportunity to interface with an agent through store displays. They’ll land on a website, and they may experience an AI agent before they actually start clicking. So it won’t just be the promise and announcement of agentic, but it’ll be the true experience maturation year.”
Retailers will focus on visibility and control within agentic. “They’ll be paying a great deal of attention to how they show up in AI conversations, and looking to improve their chances of appearing in brand-safe ways in these conversations and creating content that can serve us well,” Sky Canaves, eMarketer analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew.
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Gartner reported that 29% of marketing leaders “already claim to be in production with AI agents,” and 52% are testing them with customers, Socha pointed out.
New vocabulary: As AI agents start cropping up everywhere, another expression that could become routine in retail circles is “zero-click buying,” Sucharita Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said, meaning people can purchase products without ever clicking a “buy” button or leaving their app.
Of course, this is all easier said than done. Glitches within the existing ChatGPT/Instacart integration and Walmart’s ChatGPT instant checkout—it shows products, but without Apple Pay support, so customers still have to manually enter payment info, defeating the whole “instant” promise, Canaves said, who has tried to use both ChatGPT partnerships to purchase items.
“These are still works in progress,” Canaves said. “I think that there are risks when features that aren’t quite fully fleshed out are introduced to consumers. If they don’t work, consumers will be put off from using them again or adopting them more regularly.” And ironing these wrinkles out will (thankfully) need expert human intervention.
Overall, Gartner’s Socha said, human connection will remain essential in retail, even as AI agents handle more of the shopping experience. Only real people can test products, wear them, and share authentic experiences—which means ratings, reviews, and friend recommendations will stay crucial.
“At the same time that expectation for digital adoption will grow and come to fruition, the craving of human input and human interaction won’t stop either,” she said.