The Coming Fight Over AI Likeness Rights in Retail

A shopper messages a retailer's “product concierge” that looks and sounds exactly like the founder who launched the company a decade ago. A training video features an associate of the year, still greeting new hires long after she left for a competitor. Neither is science fiction. Generative artificial intelligence now makes it simple to turn a real person's voice and face into a standing digital agent, and retail is walking into a question it hasn't finished answering: Who owns that likeness once it's been captured, trained, and deployed?

An Asset Nobody Has Named

Retailers have always built brand identity around real people, founders, associates, ambassadors, and the store-floor personalities who make a shopping experience feel human. What's changed is that a face and voice can now become a standing digital asset, one that keeps working, keeps talking, and keeps representing the brand long after the person who inspired it has moved on.

Deloitte's 2026 Global Retail Industry Outlook, surveying 330 retail executives, found that over two-thirds expect to deploy agentic AI for core operations within 12 months to 24 months. A meaningful share of that agentic layer will be customer-facing, and a meaningful share of that will be modeled, loosely or explicitly, on real employees. The technology to scale a person's likeness is arriving faster than the contracts written to govern it, and most retail leaders haven't yet had to reckon with what that gap actually costs.

Old Frameworks, New Problem

Existing intellectual property, employment, and publicity rights laws were built for a world where a person's image showed up in a photo shoot or a commercial with a defined shelf life. None of it anticipated an interactive system capable of generating new statements, new gestures, and new “performances” indefinitely, using a real person's likeness as its raw material. That leaves basic questions unresolved: Does a severance agreement cover a digital replica trained on someone's voice? Does a brand ambassador contract anticipate that ambassador's likeness being licensed to an AI vendor after the relationship ends? Who is liable if that likeness later says something the real person never said and would never approve? Most retailers haven't had to answer these questions yet, only because most haven't built the systems that make them urgent. That window is closing quickly.

The Governance Gap

That gap is measurable, not just anecdotal. McKinsey's research on enterprise AI adoption found that even among companies sophisticated enough to formally benchmark their AI systems, only 17 percent said measuring fairness, transparency, privacy, and regulatory issues was a top priority. Most benchmarking effort still goes toward performance and cost metrics instead. Likeness rights sit squarely in that neglected category.

Meanwhile, the workforce side of this equation is getting louder. A Harvard Business Review analysis of 2026 workplace trends noted that as companies begin experimenting with “digital doppelgangers,” AI avatars trained to replicate high-performing employees and executives, questions of compensation, rights, and consent are becoming unavoidable. Retail HR and legal teams are, in most cases, not yet part of that conversation, even as marketing and technology teams move ahead with building these tools.

Looking Ahead: A Lesson for C-Suite Retail Executives

The stakes aren't abstract. McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could unlock $240 billion to $390 billion in economic value for retailers, a margin gain of roughly 1.2 to 1.9 percentage points industry-wide. Capturing that value without inviting a wave of publicity rights disputes means treating digital likeness as its own category of risk, negotiated before an AI twin is built rather than after a departure turns contentious. That means spelling out, in plain language, what happens to a person's likeness when they leave the company, whether their consent is revocable, who owns any new material a synthetic version of them generates, and who is accountable if that system misrepresents the real person it was built from.

None of this argues against retailers building these tools. The upside is real, and the retailers that move first will have an advantage. It argues for governing the technology with the same seriousness already given to trademarks, supplier contracts, and data privacy. A brand's most valuable asset has always been the people customers trust. The retail leaders who write clear rules for what happens to that trust once it's digitized, before a dispute forces the question, will be the ones who turn AI likeness into a genuine competitive advantage rather than the industry's next cautionary tale.

Alex Quinn is CEO of Authentic Interactions, where he leads the development of digital humans that combine generative and non-generative AI to create accurate, ethically grounded interactive experiences.