Should You Put a Chatbot in Front of Your Retail Store?
There are a lot of people speaking about how LLMs and Agentic Shopping will disrupt how we buy online. Yet we seem to be forgetting that 80% of shopping still happens offline. And online research is already pretty efficient today.
How can LLMs and agentic shopping help with the in-store experience?
There will still likely remain a very large cohort of use cases, social behaviors, and user types that will demand physical interaction. Even if you use an LLM to help you research, it doesn't mean it will replace your shopping journey. But it could:
Help you "reserve" the top 3 brands for you at the store for you to check out or even try on further. (After all, even your favorite brand's sizing isn't always consistent.)
Help you place pickup orders if that's more convenient for you.
Will chatbots replace in-store sales reps?
But what about within the store itself? Mr a16z threw a swing and miss on predicting eCommerce would destroy physical stores. I would predict the same fate to LLMs. So let's not give into hyperbole here, not just yet. We all know the standard response to any sales rep at the front of a store: "No thank you, I'm just looking." Why? You don't want to bother to get to know this person and give them context. Even if an LLM could transfer context from your personal agent, in a privacy safe way, the same thing would be true of an annoying, even if useful, robot trying to talk to you at the front of a store. Who's got the time?
What's a better approach for using AI in a physical store?
But what if you were walking through this store and you have a Perplexity + Apple Agentic Shopper in your Airpods, would the scenario change, and what would that mean? Not just product data, but sales rep, POS checkout, store layout, item location, retail planogram, physical shopper intent/conversion could all be fair game for LLM input. You would still have the freedom to follow your own path and keep your own data to yourself and your private agent.
What kind of information could a personal agent provide while shopping?
Could your personal agent remind you if the product you're looking at matches the project you're working on back at your home without you phoning a friend? Definitely seems possible. How about if the paint color you are staring happens to be a color your wife hates?
What is the biggest opportunity for agentic AI in retail?
To me, replacing online research and buying is great, but we are talking about cannibalization. "Agentifying" the physical world is going to be the most interesting cases -- the world is your surface area.
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