Thirty years of optimising for convenience produced a retail model that is increasingly efficient and increasingly hollow. UK consumers return £25.1 billion of non-food goods every year. The unboxing moment has replaced the shopping experience. And now AI agents are arriving to complete the transaction without the customer visiting a single website.
This is not a crisis for retail. It is a forcing function — the clearest signal the industry has received in a generation that the model built on frictionless acquisition needs to be replaced by something more durable.
In this article, Kat Graham and Christopher Imrie argue that the retailers who will thrive over the next decade are not the ones who resist agentic commerce, but the ones who understand what it creates space for: genuine experience, community, and the kind of trust that compounds over time rather than converting once and evaporating.
The shift that devastated publishing traffic — AI answering queries directly, bypassing websites entirely — is now reshaping retail product discovery. Brands whose product data is unstructured, siloed, or sustainability-poor will be invisible to AI agents. Those who treat the Digital Product Passport not as a compliance cost but as discovery infrastructure will have a structural advantage their competitors spent the same period resisting.
Meanwhile, agentic commerce may be the high street's unlikely second wind. When an AI agent routes a customer to the nearest local stockist, the mission shopping trip that moved online twenty years ago comes back through the door — and this time, what happens in store is entirely in the retailer's hands.
The article closes with the regulatory arc — ESPR, DPP, extended producer responsibility, all enforced from 2027 — and the case for seven-generation thinking as a commercial strategy rather than a values exercise. The businesses still standing in thirty years are building that foundation now.
"The retailers planting roots right now in their communities are the ones who'll still be standing in ten years."
Mary Portas · BRC Leaders Summer School, May 2026