AI Agents Get to Work in Retail
By PYMNTS
AI summary of the source article
Autonomous AI agents are transforming retail by shifting consumer discovery and purchasing directly to data feeds and API endpoints. Industry reports highlight that digitally influenced sales already surpass 60%, with tools like Amazon’s Buy for Me, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini executing tasks from research to checkout. To adapt, retailers must resolve fragmented data and decide whether to block agents, share select information, adopt hybrid models, or fully open their catalogs. Some companies are also building dedicated machine-readable infrastructure for agents. Retailers such as Apparel Group have already integrated AI across forecasting, inventory replenishment, and pricing to improve efficiency and reduce working capital requirements.
Why it matters
As autonomous AI agents execute purchases from research to checkout, retail competitiveness will increasingly depend on machine-readable data architecture rather than traditional human-facing websites.
Key facts
- Digitally influenced sales already exceed 60%, with AI agents expanding into auto-replenishment and purchasing.
- AI tools including Amazon's Buy for Me, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini are actively crawling vendor sites to research and recommend products.
- Apparel Group has deployed live AI models across more than 85 brands and 2,500 stores to automate forecasting, allocation, replenishment, and pricing.