Why agentic commerce stole the spotlight at NRF

Last week, tens of thousands of retail professionals packed the Jacob K. Javits Center in Manhattan for NRF 2026, the Big Show, to network and connect, but also to figure out whether AI shopping can deliver real results.

Agentic AI was the focal point of this year’s discussions with retailers and technologists coming together to deliver solutions. As agentic capabilities start to take real shape with big announcements from Google and Walmart being the star of the show, execution of agentic AI became a major talking point this year for everyone in attendance, both on- and offstage.

Microsoft announced that you can buy products on its AI assistant Copilot. In a smaller vein, rival OpenAI made its presence felt in a panel discussion with Target with two company executives talking about its ChatGPT integration.

The reality of an AI agent independently shopping for people is expected to take hold faster than anyone expected, all while still keeping humans in the loop. The future, experts said, will be much more autonomous as people move from keyword searches to natural conversations when shopping online. However, it remains to be seen if this is merely a show of bragging rights for retailers or a genuine shift in shopping behavior.

Running on agents: “Today what we are seeing in market is predominantly bilateral agreements popping up between agents and certain retailers,” Jack Hilger, senior director of product at payments giant Visa, told the audience during a panel discussion on “Empowering the AI shopper: Creating friction-free experiences in the age of agentic commerce.”

But Hilger said these shopping experiences “look and feel a lot like a traditional e-commerce shopping experience as opposed to a truly native agentic commerce experience—where agents are autonomously operating and executing on the web and actually making that payment.” The gap between the present and the fully agentic future is where much of the infrastructure work is happening now.

AI takes the wheel: One of the key players building the agentic commerce infrastructure within retail is OpenAI. And Ashley Kramer, VP of enterprise at OpenAI, shared the way the tech giant thinks about retail partnerships like the one it struck with Target last year.

“We have top-down support, but also empower people bottom up to really understand how they can leverage what we built or what we’re about to build together,” Kramer said. “That’s when we can move a lot faster together.”

“In the pillars of AI strategy, it has to start with people, and people in retail need a lot of different things,” she added. It’s important to take everyone along, from team members to storefront executives to vendors, she said, citing the Target example. However, internal readiness alone would mean nothing without consumer trust.

On the panel with Visa’s Hilger, Andrew Laudato, EVP and COO at The Vitamin Shoppe, cited numbers from a Harris poll that showed 40% of users in December used AI to assist with their shopping. The key word being “assist” because these people are “not completing their entire transaction,” but using it to gather information, Laudato added.

Retail is a top focus for OpenAI, Kramer said, calling it one of the sectors where the company expects the entire customer experience to be fundamentally transformed.

“It’s why we’re continuing to work with a lot of you to drive what that future is,” Kramer said. “Because to me, that is the most exciting thing. We are creating it together with the industry experts, and we can really drive what’s next.”

As AI agents pop up across the industry, “zero-click buying” may soon become a familiar phrase in retail.

“My expectation is we will see over time consumers becoming more comfortable with agents…as they choose to delegate more tasks [to them],” Hilger added. That growing comfort opens the door for a more agentic future of everyday commerce.

With agentic AI being touted by some as the biggest invention since the internet, Hilger’s bullish picture for the future may prove true eventually.

“I’d say a really successful future state of agents looks a lot like a personal assistant, a personal shopper, travel agent—all funneled into one that’s highly confident and you trust handing your card over to this thing to go off and do your shopping for you and actually make those purchases.”