The Holiday Retail Season is Here — and So is Agentic AI 

Global online sales rose 4 percent year-over-year (YoY) in Q2 2025, powered by a 6 percent YoY surge in online traffic volumes, according to Salesforce. Digital sales are now projected to reach a staggering $1.25 trillion this year, with artificial intelligence- and agent-referred traffic driving one in five holiday purchases worldwide.

For retailers, that’s both opportunity and pressure. The holiday season remains a volatile battlefield of shifting demand, price wars, and fleeting loyalty. Success will depend on how intelligently brands can anticipate, personalize and act.

Enter agentic AI, a new generation of autonomous digital assistants that don’t just recommend but decide and execute. As product discovery, personalization and unified commerce converge, the real question for retailers is clear: How fast can you turn agentic intelligence into competitive advantage?

From Automation to Autonomy: The Agentic AI Shift in Retail

Today, retail has become an always-on cycle of engagement and service, and agentic AI will only accentuate this. Agent-driven workflows span both revenue and experience, and every touchpoint is now an opportunity for monetization and experience creation. Be it allocating and reallocating ad spend across the campaign cycle, real-time personalization of offers, or seamless resolution of customer issues, agentic AI can autonomously complete what needs to be done.

Agentic AI’s abilities in autonomous goal setting, contextual awareness, and the orchestration of complex processes are remarkable — and are already changing retail. Agentic AI will become a fundamental pillar of autonomous commerce. All of this will elevate the holiday shopping experience.

Agentic AI’s Impact on Retail Excellence

During the holiday season, retail transactions hinge on lightning-fast decisions, actions and responses. Agentic AI can compress decision-making and reaction times to mere seconds, empowering retailers to respond almost instantly to shifting consumer preferences and competitor moves, both critical to maximizing sales during peak demand periods. Let’s explore some of the emerging use cases:

1. Intelligent Agents: Chatbots can now be more intelligent and integrated than ever before, working with customers to resolve issues rather than merely conversing about them. For example, they can find and book a convenient delivery slot or provide expert product advice. Take Amazon.com's Rufus, for instance. It's an agentic companion estimated to have boosted web purchasing completion rates by 60 percent, translating to $10 billion revenue uplift. There are many other examples, such as managing returns, processing instant refunds, and more.
2. Dynamic Pricing Agents: Agentic technology can autonomously bring together competitor pricing, demand signals, elasticity models, clickstream behavior, and inventory status to optimize pricing across SKUs, stores, and channels in real time. Simulating and learning from vast volumes of data and possible outcomes, they dynamically and accurately manage promotion tiers in real time for various products, categories and consumer cohorts. For example, Amazon provides tailored discounts to shoppers browsing high-demand products. Using tools like Brand Tailored Promotions, sellers can target high-intent shoppers with personalized offers, closing sales efficiently and protecting margins. The same can be true for in-store offers, using loyalty data and inventory status.
3. Supply and Demand Monitoring: Agentic systems continuously monitor market demand, competitor moves, and supply constraints to accurately predict surges or slowdowns. If a competitor drops prices on a key category, AI agents can not only adjust pricing in real time but also reallocate inventory to high-traffic stores or fulfillment centers. They can even simulate “what-if” supply scenarios — e.g., logistics delays or sudden spikes in regional demand — to automatically rebalance stock, ensuring retailers stay one step ahead of disruption.

In all of this, autonomous agents can proactively anticipate customer problems and provide personalized and instantaneous resolutions.

Could Agentic AI Become a Threat to Retailers?

Imagine a shopping season when customers never visit a retailer’s site. Instead, their AI agents find, compare and buy everything for them. That’s the emerging world of zero-click commerce, where agents (not humans) control the purchase journey.

If direct traffic fades, how will retailers capture first-party data or shape brand preference? What happens when algorithms choose based on price, ratings and delivery speed, stripping away the emotion and impulse that drive loyalty?

Retailers will need to rethink data ownership and agent strategy. The future lies in seamless “handshakes” between external agents (search, social, marketplaces) and in-house retail agents that manage pricing, personalization and experience.

What we can see emerging this holiday season with agentically boosted sales is just the start of a much wider transformation.

Manish Vora is the business unit head of manufacturing, retail and consumer products at WNS, part of Capgemini. WNS is a global business process management company.