by Research shows 48% of retailers plan to deploy artificial intelligence agents by this year
The retail industry, as we know it, is undergoing rapid change. According to research from the global advisory firm Gartner, 48% of retailers plan to deploy artificial intelligence agents by 2026. Agentic AI will not only change the way retailers do business but also revolutionize consumers’ expectations for seamless experiences.
Accounting and consulting firm PwC defines agentic AI as “AI systems that possess the capacity to make autonomous decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals with limited or no direct human intervention.” As retail consultant and writer Bob Phibbs wrote last year in an article for his website, Retail Doctor, “AI is moving from search engine to action-taker.” That change is no longer a futuristic forecast, but reality.
One example is the agentic AI solutions unveiled by Microsoft in January. According to a news release from the Redmond, Washington-based company, its solutions are designed to help retailers who “continue to grapple with high turnover and a shortage of skilled frontline staff.”
One of its newest products is Copilot Checkout, which will “enable merchants to reach shoppers as they complete purchases discovered directly within Copilot without being redirected to external sites,” a news release from Microsoft stated. Microsoft also launched a catalog enrichment agent template in Copilot Studio, an intelligent assistant that extracts product attributes from images, enriches them with social insights, and automates catalog tasks such as product onboarding, categorization, and error resolution.
“The retailers that thrive will be the ones that unify their business with intelligence that reaches every corner of the value chain,” said Kathleen Mitford, corporate vice president of global industry for Microsoft. “With Microsoft’s agentic AI, retailers can automate what slows them down and amplify what sets them apart, enabling faster decisions and stronger customer relationships while building operations ready for whatever comes next.”
In November 2025, the Arcadia, Wisconsin-based home furnishings retailer Ashley Furniture announced the launch of its partnership with AI-powered answer engine Perplexity and payment provider PayPal. The partnership allows shoppers to ask for product recommendations, receive curated options in return, add items to their cart, and check out in one process.
“This moment signals where retail is headed—and where Ashley intends to lead,” said Chad Spencer, chief executive officer of Ashley Global Retail. “AI-powered commerce gives us the ability to anticipate guest needs, personalize in real time, and deliver a seamless experience from discovery to purchase.”
Viki Zabala, chief strategy and growth officer at First Insight, a Warrendale, Pennsylvania-based retail consumer insights and AI-driven predictive analytics company, said: “Agentic AI is collapsing what used to be a long, fragmented purchasing funnel into a single guided decision flow, which is why moves like Ashley’s matter.”
These tools fit into consulting firm McKinsey’s definition of level three agentic AI. (The company’s scale ranges from 0 to 5, based on lowest to highest autonomy.) Level three involves supervised execution that places an order within established guardrails. For example, a customer could input that they’re looking for an 80-inch long, brown leather sofa under $2,000. With a home furnishings marketplace that feels nearly boundless these days, thanks to the internet, this will bring a new level of curation to consumers.
Daniela Alilovic, an interior designer based in Toronto, said “AI tools are reshaping how consumers shop by dramatically reducing the time and effort required to find furniture. What once took hours — or even days — of browsing multiple retailers is increasingly being replaced by AI-driven tools that filter furniture selections based on specific requirements. From there, consumers (myself included) can make decisions much more efficiently. This shift means AI has the power to significantly increase — or decrease — a brand’s or furniture piece’s likelihood of converting, depending on how it surfaces within these tools.”
For retailers, enabling agentic AI helps narrow customers’ preferences for price, color, and style, which is important, but what will help companies capture more conversions is also embedding seamless financing options. Matthew Dishman, CEO of LendPro, a cloud-based consumer financing system, refers to this as the “true shift.”
Similar to how PayPal is a digital wallet, so is LendPro, which is integrated with more than 20 lenders for prime to subprime financing. In addition to aesthetic parameters, it’s important to allow customers to input that they’re looking for a sale or have fair credit and need financing options. Agentic AI can then return results that fit all these parameters and check out on the consumer’s behalf.
“We wanted to ensure that the average independent [retailer] understood agentic and had a full payment plan inserted,” Dishman said. “That’s probably our largest initiative in 2026 to ensure that they’re catching that customer in the journey.”
Although AI will be essential for companies to remain competitive, it does not replace one of retail’s most important elements: the human touch.
“Retailers should also be careful not to think of AI as a digital salesperson,” Zabala added. “Agentic systems are better understood as decision companions. They’re designed to be trusted, which means when consumers ask about a specific brand or product, the answers will often be honest and sometimes blunt. These systems optimize for trust, not persuasion. More than ever, the brand is not owned by the company but by how others define it.”
According to Zabala, home furnishings is a “uniquely challenging category due to its hybrid nature.” She added: “Discovery is now largely online, but the physical experience still matters — customers want to experience materials and scale. Agentic systems won’t replace the showroom overnight, but as the online experience becomes more robust, anything is possible.”
