October 2, 2026
Ahead of the FT Future of Retail Summit, Equal Experts lead Emma Payne sat down with Paul Sims, Retail Strategy Consultant, to dissect the architectural, strategic, and commercial shifts retailers must navigate as AI agents begin to transact on behalf of consumers.
Emma Payne: A key question for retail moving forward is how the customer’s digital journey evolves as AI moves from synthesising search results to executing purchases. What are some key considerations when navigating these changes?
Paul Sims: More than most retailers have priced in, I think.
For twenty years, visibility meant SEO: retailers structured their sites, built their reputation and fought for a position in a ranked list that a human then chose from. GEO shifted that: they’re no longer competing for a position, they’re competing to be cited in an answer. AXO goes further still, and it’s a more fundamental change, because when an agent acts rather than just answers, the requirements become operational. It needs live inventory it can query, fulfilment commitments it can actually rely on, structured attributes it can filter against. And the competitive dynamic is different too. In search, every website could theoretically appear, but in agent shortlisting, the consideration set is compressed – circa three options, not thirty. If a retailer’s data isn’t ready, they’re not just ranked lower – they simply don’t exist for that transaction.
Emma Payne: It sounds like basic discoverability is the key part of the challenge, before you even consider customer experience. Are retailers at risk of missing the opportunity here?
Paul Sims: Retailers are investing heavily in conversational experiments but they’re missing the fundamental plumbing. Many organisations have security policies and firewall configurations designed to block aggressive scrapers and malicious bots. But in doing so, they inadvertently block the legitimate web crawlers that feed the data models powering commercial recommendations. Before retail leaders worry about front-end experiences, they need to find out whether the crawlers that feed AI recommendations can actually reach their site.
Emma Payne: If customer discovery moves to platform agents, what do you think happens to those high-margin retail media networks?
Paul Sims: The problem is that the whole model assumes a human is browsing your site, to see those homepage banners and sponsored search slots. But if shoppers start handing the legwork over to AI, footfall on those pages vanishes. So brands will pack up and move that advertising money to whichever platform agent is running the show – its going to be quite a race.
However, that ‘ad spend’ isn’t about buying digital billboards, success is about data hygiene, because if you want brands to sell through you, then your real-time inventory and product feed APIs have to be rock solid.
Emma Payne: That dynamic must also change how brands balance direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels with third-party wholesale partners. How should they navigate that tension?
Paul Sims: The classic rationale for DTC was that the retailer kept control over pricing, the customer relationship, and margins, whereas wholesale offered sheer distribution scale. But of course, an AI agent is indifferent to brand loyalty. It’s busy evaluating every endpoint objectively, weighing things like data quality, price transparency, fulfilment speed, and brand review credibility.
Emma Payne: That brings us to a pretty existential challenge for traditional retailers: how do they avoid being demoted to a low-margin fulfilment layer while tech platforms capture the customer?
Paul Sims: The temptation is to resist the agent layer, but think that’s a losing battle. The priority for any retailer must be remaining the merchant of record (MoR). That means you keep control of legal and financial accountability for the transaction: you control the price, process the payment, manage the returns lifecycle, and maintain the direct customer relationship.
Platforms want retailers to give up this layer, but that turns the retailer into a generic warehouse that just fulfils orders. If you don’t want that to happen then, as a retailer, you need to build systems that agents actively prefer to transact with. That’s going to take bulletproof transactional APIs and things like real-time inventory guarantees, or loyalty schemes that are machine-readable, so agents can calculate and apply member benefits automatically.
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.
Paul is a Retail Technology Strategy Consultant, who recently joined Equal Experts after spending the last 20+ years working for retailers across the globe, including positions as CTO at Halfords and Chief Architect at New Look, Primark, Marks & Spencer, and Argos in Shanghai.
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