2026 Predictions: AI Won’t (Fully) Replace Shopping, But it Will Rewrite Who Wins in Retail

If 2025 was the year retailers experimented with artificial intelligence, 2026 will be the year the industry is forced to confront a harder truth: AI will absolutely reshuffle the power dynamics across discovery, media and onsite experience. And most retailers aren’t ready.

The industry is fascinated with the idea of end-to-end AI shopping agents making purchases autonomously. But let’s be honest, shopping isn't where AI will make its biggest impact in the next year to 18 months.

The real disruption is already happening earlier in the journey, long before a transaction is even on the table.

The First Big Shift: AI is Upending the Discovery Stage, and Retailers Are Losing Control

Whether or not a purchase happens on a retailer’s site is no longer the starting point. Discovery has moved upstream, and AI is quickly becoming the place where shoppers build the shortlists that shape every downstream decision.

One in five holiday transactions was projected to involve AI assistants in 2025. Considering only about 15 percent of retail transactions happen online, this means consumers are leaning heavily on AI even when they buy in-store. In fact, Walmart’s 2025 Retail Rewired Report revealed that 54 percent of shoppers believe digital assistants save time when shopping in-store. That’s the quiet revolution, and it’s happening right now.

Retailers used to own this moment. They built search bars like front doors. They optimized category pages as conversion engines. But now shoppers increasingly walk through AI instead and land on a PDP page or even right into the cart. Retailers need to rethink what it means to “win” discovery when they no longer control the entry point.

If retailers don’t adapt, AI will become the ultimate gatekeeper.

A Hard Truth: Not Every Product Category Deserves or Benefits From AI Agents

There’s a growing divide in the industry between the “AI will buy everything” crowd and the “AI will buy nothing” crowd. The truth is far less dramatic and far more operationally important: AI will become a major driver of transactions in the categories where it meaningfully increases consumer confidence. Discovery alone doesn’t convert; confidence does. And in commerce, confidence is built through clarity, credibility and relevance.

We’re already seeing early signals of where AI’s transactional influence will accelerate fastest: categories with high complexity, high research friction, or high perceived risk. Think electronics, financial services, health and wellness, travel, and big-ticket retail. These are categories where consumers are inundated with options, specifications, reviews and fine print, and where getting it wrong feels costly. In those environments, a well-trained AI agent that can synthesize reviews, compare features, explain trade-offs and personalize recommendations does more than surface products; it actively resolves uncertainty.

That said, there are some categories where basic product recommendations and subscriptions already handle the convenience layer well enough and there’s limited incremental confidence for AI to unlock. Retailers should stop preparing for a world where AI replaces every cart and instead double down on the categories and missions where AI can create breakthrough value today.

The Media Side Will Change Faster Than the Shopper Side, and That’s Where the Real Opportunity Is

2026 will be the year that agentic AI fully enters the media supply chain, whether the consumer-facing experience is ready or not. While consumer behavior will evolve over time, retail media is transforming now. This is the part too often left out of the AI debate. Media buying, optimization, creative generation, forecasting and measurement will all be enhanced by AI before the shopper even sees an ad.

The Walmart-OpenAI deal is a preview of this future. It’s not just about search. It’s about enabling a completely new layer of media and performance capabilities that retailers, brands and agencies will need to adapt to rapidly. The retailers that lean in early will win disproportionate efficiency. Those that wait will find that AI didn’t just change shopper behavior, it changed how competition works.

Retail’s Biggest Problem Isn’t AI, it’s That Most Onsite Experiences Aren’t Good Enough

Here’s the uncomfortable but necessary truth: if AI takes a bigger share of the discovery pie, many retailers have only themselves to blame.

The industry is pointing to tools like OpenAI and Google Gemini as existential threats, but in reality the biggest threat is the gap between what today’s shoppers expect and what most retailer websites actually deliver. Too many onsite experiences feel outdated, generic or built around internal constraints rather than shopper needs. Search quality lags. Navigation is clunky. Personalization is inconsistent. Compare that to Google Shopping, where one can quickly get a structured, personalized, attribute-driven view of the entire market.

Most retail sites simply haven’t kept pace with modern shopping behavior. Meanwhile, the bar for what “good” looks like has been completely reset by external platforms. Google Shopping offers a more coherent cross-retailer experience than many retailers offer within their own four walls. TikTok and Instagram have introduced highly visual, inspiration-led browsing that feels fluid and natural. Amazon.com continues to compress the distance between discovery and purchase.

If AI sends a shopper to a retailer’s site and the experience collapses, that’s not an AI problem. That’s an infrastructure problem. The hard reality is this: AI is exposing weaknesses that have existed for years, slowly, quietly and in plain sight, including poor onsite discovery, broken personalization, disconnected customer journeys, and more.

Retailers Win With Infrastructure: Clean Data and Highly Optimized Onsite Experiences Make the Biggest Impact

AI favors clarity. Retailers win when their product data is clean, structured and machine-readable, because that's how AI builds confident answers. That means investing in attributes, hierarchy, taxonomy and real availability signals. Retailers with strong data foundations will see AI route more traffic to them by default.

Then, when AI hands off traffic, the experience must convert. The retailers that win will deliver fast, modern, personalized, credible onsite shopping that feels closer to Google Shopping or TikTok than to a legacy e-commerce template. If the experience increases confidence, AI keeps sending shoppers back.

As examples, Kroger’s digital app refresh and Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus stand out as proof that disciplined investment in onsite experience still pays off. Kroger’s effort shows what happens when a retailer takes site speed, search, personalization and mobile usability seriously — it becomes easier for shoppers (and increasingly, AI-driven traffic) to navigate, compare and complete purchases with confidence. Amazon, meanwhile, continues to set the pace not because of a single AI feature, but because of its relentless optimization across every part of the commerce funnel: discovery, recommendations, checkout, fulfillment and post-purchase engagement. Together, they illustrate a clear truth: AI doesn’t reward stagnation; it rewards infrastructure.

As AI begins to route shoppers directly to “best answers” instead of broad category pages, only retailers with modern, machine-readable, high-confidence experiences (for both human shoppers and AI agents) will capture that demand. The ones that invest will see AI act as a net-new growth engine.

Eric Brackmann is vice president, commerce media at Koddi, an industry-leading commerce media technology provider.