**AI, Agents and the Future of Shopping: How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape Retail, by Simon Ellis, a Head of AI Transformation and Enterprise Architecture - Pets at Home** **Abstract** AI is beginning to change commerce in a much more fundamental way than simply improving recommendations, search or customer service. We are moving towards a world of **agentic commerce**, where AI agents can understand what consumers want, research products and services, compare alternatives, negotiate trade-offs and increasingly complete transactions on their behalf. This talk explores what happens when the traditional shopping journey starts to disappear and the interface between the consumer and the retailer becomes an intelligent agent. We will look at the rapid development of AI-powered shopping experiences from organisations including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify and others, alongside emerging approaches that could dynamically reconstruct digital experiences around an individual consumer's intent rather than forcing them to navigate conventional websites. The implications for retailers are significant. If an AI agent becomes the primary way that customers discover and select products, traditional advantages such as website design, search rankings, advertising, merchandising and even brand loyalty may start to work very differently. Retailers will need to consider how they make their products, services, inventory, pricing and propositions understandable and accessible not just to humans, but to machines acting on their behalf. The session will examine the opportunities and risks from both sides of this emerging ecosystem: what agentic commerce could mean for consumers, how retailers may need to respond, where value could shift within the industry, and which organisations are positioning themselves to control the next generation of commerce. It will also consider some more provocative questions: **What happens when customers stop visiting websites? Who owns the custo

Description supplied by the event organiser.