October 1, 2026
Retailers have spent decades trying to own the customer relationship, adopting everything from loyalty schemes to apps, personalised websites and recommendation engines. We’ve seen enormous investment in frictionless customer journeys, with the goal of helping people to discover, choose, buy and receive products more easily – and keep coming back.
Emma Payne, Strategic Advisor at Equal Experts, talks to Liz Leakey, Head of Retail, about how shopping with AI presents new challenges for retailers and the impact this could have on the customer experience of the future.
Emma: What do retailers need to consider now about how AI is changing the customer experience?
Liz: The primary shift is going to be around who owns the customer relationship, and who has influence over that shopping experience. Until recently the model was clear: retailer to customer or marketplace to manufacturer, to customer.
Now, if a consumer asks AI to find a new washing machine, they might never land on the retailer’s website, so they miss the curated interface, thoughtful merchandising and distinct brand experience that are all designed to build loyalty. Instead, the AI gives them three recommendations, and they choose one.
The retailer still fulfils the transaction, but someone else owns the relationship and that means the retailer > customer relationship weakens a little.
Shopping with AI is more than a new acquisition channel. It potentially changes where customer knowledge sits, who controls discovery and most importantly, who gets to understand customer intent.
This introduces some interesting tensions. AI can remove friction but it can also remove discovery. It can personalise, but it can also feel intrusive or creepy. It can improve service but it can also feel soulless – I could go on, in short – it’s a lot to navigate!
Emma: So what we’re seeing is the emergence of intent-based commerce rather than journey-based commerce, and are retailers optimised for that?
Liz: Exactly. Today, customers make the final call, guided by merchandising, personalised suggestions and promotions. AI AI introduces another possibility – a new experience, where we ask for recommendations based on the context and requirements we provide. The natural next step is that customers start delegating some buying decisions to AI – ‘find me some options’ becomes ‘choose one for me’ and eventually, ‘just buy it when the price is right’.
That’s a big change in terms of shopping experience and who’s making the decisions. McKinsey found that 38% of surveyed consumers across the UK, France and Germany used AI to research products or decide what to buy. Of those 63% used it to compare brands, prices, models and reviews. However consumers remain cautious about automated purchasing and are much less comfortable delegating the final transaction. In the UK only one in five Britons trusts AI in retail overall.
Personally, I think I’d be more inclined to delegate a low risk purchase like grey school trousers, compared to buying a new sofa or a very specific type of DIY equipment. There are some parallels here with subscription models and what people are willing to hand over to an agent.
What is the role of Brand in all this? We know people associate brands with trust, credibility, reliability and in the best cases, affection.
Household brands have always differentiated through visual identity, tone of voice, store experience, storytelling, speed of service, product curation and showing up in a consistent way for their customers.
We saw this first hand when we worked at Pret, and explored a Click and Collect proposition to speed up the service. Customers told us that they loved the experience of browsing products, the friendly interaction with the staff at the till, the current speed of service and the quality of the food and drinks. They didn’t need a click and collect experience – they valued the current experience.
AI gives us a more transactional experience based on things like price, availability, reviews and relevance, but at the cost of the emotional connection to that brand. We can dial up the emotional relationship and build trust in other ways, like building a sense of community and investing in the physical store experience to be more immersive and enriching. Life isn’t only about efficiency, amplifying the leisure and joyful side of shopping, will mean creating new experiences.
Emma: What will retailers need to do to stay relevant and maintain their brand position?
Ultimately we know that a relationship with a brand is all about trust, so as we use AI more and more as we shop, we know that retailers will need to find ways to provide greater transparency to give customers confidence – Why did you recommend this? Is the answer right? Can I trust the recommendation? Are you being paid to recommend it? What happens when it gets it wrong? To do that well, they’ll also need to invest in managing knowledge and the data underpinning the experience. But hey, that’s a whole other topic!
But going back to the idea of intent, essentially a purchase becomes an instruction, with guardrails, constraints and preferences defined by consumers upfront, like a set of rules. So a consumer may instruct an AI agent:
Brand preference therefore becomes an “allow list” or weighted rule inside the agent, not just a feeling triggered by advertising.
In an agent driven retail landscape it will be those who earn a permanent spot on the consumer’s allow list through trust and transparency, who win.
Emma Payne is a digital transformation and technology executive with over 25 years of experience across retail and the private sector. She has held senior leadership roles including Global Director of Technology and Product at John Lewis & Partners and Pret A Manger, reporting into the Executive Board. She has deep expertise and a proven track record in digital transformation, technology strategy, customer experience and AI adoption.
As a long-standing customer of Equal Experts, Emma joined the advisory team in 2023. She now works with senior leaders and high-performing teams on strategic planning, complex transformations and building lasting partnerships that deliver measurable business value.
Connect with Emma on LinkedIn.
Liz Leakey is Retail Portfolio Lead at Equal Experts, with over 20 years of experience leading creative digital teams to deliver outstanding user experiences. She has worked with some of the UK’s best-known retail and consumer organisations, including Pret a Manger, The Very Group and the John Lewis Partnership, alongside the BBC, Sky Betting & Gaming and the Department for Work and Pensions.
Liz helps teams take a user-centred approach to building products and services, combining customer insight, empathy and diverse thinking to solve complex problems. With extensive experience across retail, she brings a strong understanding of changing customer expectations and how digital experiences can strengthen the relationship between retailers and their customers.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
