Agentic AI Is Reshaping Shopping...Is Your Retail Media Strategy Keeping Up?
The Point of Decision Is Moving
For most of retail media's history, the question has been where to put the ad? Store entrance or the shelf edge? On-site search or category pages? Facebook or Instagram? The surfaces changed, but the underlying assumption held: a shopper would arrive, look at something and decide.
AI shopping agents change that assumption quite fundamentally. When an assistant researches, compares and assembles the basket, the shopper no longer arrives at a choice, they arrive at an answer.
This raises a question retailers are now having to answer commercially rather than theoretically: when a machine does the shopping, who owns the customer relationship?
This Is Already Happening
In March 2026, Carrefour became the first major European retailer to put a large range of products inside ChatGPT. Shoppers describe what they need a week of meals, a dietary restriction, a budget, and the assistant handles recipe ideas, checks availability and builds the basket, with the order finalised on Carrefour.fr.
Walmart's experience is also instructive. In November last year it offered around 200,000 products through OpenAI's Instant Checkout. Its EVP of product and design, Daniel Danker, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-through transactions, called the experience "unsatisfying", and confirmed Walmart was moving away from it. Walmart now embeds its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT, accepting the distribution while keeping the login, the cart, the checkout and the customer data.
Tesco is trialling an AI assistant in its own app following a three-year partnership with Mistral AI, and Kroger is rolling out Instacart's Cart Assistant in its.
The conclusion is not in doubt, agentic commerce is here.
What Online Retail Media Risks Losing
Some consequences follow quickly.
The sponsored result on a category page stops being where the decision happens. Product data becomes a media asset, because an agent weighs price, specification, availability and reviews rather than brand equity.
Attribution gets harder, because when discovery and consideration happen inside someone else's interface, the retailer's data can begin at add-to-cart with everything upstream invisible.
None of this is fatal, but it does mean the online environment becomes harder to influence at precisely the stage where influence matters most.
Why the Physical Store Gains Strategic Importance
Agentic commerce may make online shopping more convenient, but that convenience comes at a price. The agent narrows the range, compares the options and presents a manageable answer. That is useful for shoppers, but it also reduces the opportunities brands have to be seen outside the agent's chosen set.
The physical store works differently. A shopper may arrive with a list, but they still encounter products, displays, promotions and ideas they did not ask an algorithm to find. They can see scale, colour and packaging, handle a product, sample it and change their mind. That capacity for discovery is important.
As online discovery becomes more mediated, in-store retail media becomes more than a legacy advertising channel. It is one of the few remaining environments where retailers and brands can create new demand at the point of purchase.
Five implications follow:
The physical shelf becomes more strategically valuable. If an assistant narrows the options before the shopper ever sees them, the store remains a place where brands can interrupt, inspire and introduce something unexpected.
In-store media becomes part of an omnichannel response. It is no longer the analogue component of an ecommerce strategy. It becomes a deliberately different discovery environment, chosen for what it does that the alternative cannot.
Execution quality matters more. If in-store carries more responsibility for discovery, retailers need confidence that campaigns were installed correctly, in the right locations, for the agreed duration. The tolerance for "we think it went up" narrows considerably.
The store needs to become measurable media inventory. That means accurate records of formats, locations, availability, campaign activity and compliance, not spreadsheets and occasional photographs.
Online intent can inform in-store activation. Agent conversations reveal missions and needs; the store provides the physical experience. Retailers who connect those layers can build propositions no pure-play network can match.
The Standard That Comes With It
Greater strategic importance brings a higher standard of accountability. Retailers cannot present the store as premium media inventory while planning campaigns in disconnected spreadsheets, maintaining an incomplete view of available locations, or relying on anecdotal evidence that activity was installed. If in-store is to carry more of the discovery burden, it must be planned, executed and measured with the discipline expected of digital media.
That is the harder half of the opportunity, and it is where most retail media businesses are least prepared.
What Retailers Should Do Now
The practical steps are reasonably clear:
Catalogue the available in-store media estate.
Digitise formats, locations and availability.
Connect campaigns to stores, aisles and products.
Verify installation and compliance consistently.
Measure exposure and outcomes.
Connect planning, execution and reporting.
Build propositions around shopper missions, not isolated formats.
None of this requires a view on how quickly agentic commerce arrives. It is worth doing regardless, which is exactly what makes it the right place to start.
Bottom line: The Store is not obsolete, it’s the opposite
Agentic commerce does not make the store irrelevant. It increases the value of the things only the store can provide, unmediated encounter, physical experience, and the chance to change a shopper's mind about something they never asked for.
The retailers who benefit will be those who treat that capability as media inventory worth planning, verifying and measuring properly.
If you are considering how your in-store media estate needs to evolve from inventory and planning through to execution, compliance and measurement we would be happy to share what we are seeing.