For decades, consumer brands have competed for the same scarce assets: attention, shelf space, search visibility, and retail access. Winning meant building distinctive brands, securing distribution, funding media reach, and converting shoppers at the point of sale. That model is not disappearing. But it is being challenged by a new layer between consumer intent and commercial outcome: AI.

Agentic commerce is often described as a future in which autonomous agents buy products on behalf of consumers. That future may come, but it is not the most important near-term story. The more immediate shift is subtler and more strategic: AI is beginning to mediate how consumers discover, compare, shortlist, and decide what to buy. The distinction matters. Fully autonomous AI checkout remains in early stages. Consumer trust, payment complexity, retailer control, and the desire for human agency all limit adoption.

The early data on artificial intelligence shopping is in and it has a story to tell. Shopify reported that shoppers who arrive at e-commerce sites through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are 50 percent more likely to convert to purchase than those coming from organic search. Not only are they more likely to make a purchase but when they do, they spend 14 percent more per order. More than half of these AI-referred sessions land directly on a product page, ready to buy.

The Switzerland Luxury Market Report 2026 examines how one of the world’s most sophisticated luxury markets continues to perform amid economic uncertainty, changing consumer expectations and global disruption. Discover how wealth, craftsmanship, tourism, digital innovation and sustainability are influencing the future of luxury retail in Switzerland.

Understanding the Swiss Luxury Market

The Switzerland Luxury Market Report 2026 provides an in-depth analysis of this distinctive retail landscape. It explores everything from the strength of the Swiss watch industry to the growth of mobile commerce, personalised customer experiences and sustainable luxury.

Omnichannel retail has evolved to include artificial intelligence and agentic agents, but stores still need to focus on customer experiences and brand loyalty in order to drive traffic, executives from Ulta, Stitch Fix and other companies said during a Wednesday panel at the CommerceNext Growth Show in New York.

In order to meet consumers where they are, retailers need to understand how consumers are shopping, said Kimberly Shenk, CEO of marketing technology firm Novi, during a panel covering the future of omnichannel retail. “Most consumers are shifting discovery to agents, agentic platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini,” she said, adding that as a result, brand identity has to be consistent across every touchpoint.

Retailers are no longer asking whether artificial intelligence belongs in the business. Nearly every organization is experimenting with AI in some form, whether through personalization engines, predictive inventory tools, customer service assistants, or emerging agentic experiences.  The challenge now is understanding how to measure its impact as AI increasingly shapes discovery, decision-making and customer engagement.

Acquiring a new customer has never been cheap. But the past few years have made it significantly more expensive. CPCs are up. Organic reach has narrowed. The performance marketing channels that powered a decade of retail growth are delivering diminishing returns, and retail teams are feeling it in their budgets.

The usual instinct is to look for the next new thing. What’s emerging instead is a format that predates the internet entirely.

Despite continued pressure on margins and growth, renewed momentum is emerging in European grocery in 2026—with private label, adjacencies, M&A, and AI opening new pockets of opportunity. The year 2025 was characterized by low-growth stabilization under sustained profitability pressure. In Europe,¹ grocery sales grew by 3.4 percent—consumer prices continued to increase moderately by 2.9 percent, while volume grew by 0.6 percent, with marginal downtrading at –0.1 percent.² While cost and margin pressure remained the top concern for CEOs, overall executive sentiment improved, with a majority expecting market conditions to remain stable or improve. Consumer behavior also showed emerging markers of stabilization, with only limited shifts in spending patterns compared to 2024—private label continued to gain relevance, reaching a 40 percent share, while growth of online shopping decelerated.

You weren’t planning to shop, but you bought something anyway. That’s now the norm — 86% of shoppers say they make unplanned online purchases every month, often discovering products while scrolling, streaming, or browsing social media.

Impulse buying isn’t the exception — it’s the default. People are discovering products in everyday digital moments, often on platforms not designed for shopping. If brands don’t connect quickly, the opportunity disappears just as fast.