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AI is changing how customers search, shop, and interact with brands. Can retailers use real-time personalisation to create more relevant experiences across every channel?
The retail journey is becoming harder to map.
Customers move between social platforms, search engines, AI tools, websites and physical stores without thinking about the boundaries between them. They discover a product in one place, compare it somewhere else and increasingly expect brands to understand what they are looking for in the moment.
For retailers, that changes the task. Personalisation can no longer mean simply remembering what a customer bought or recommending the next product based on past behaviour. The bigger opportunity is to recognise intent as it emerges and shape the experience around it.
That is where AI, particularly agentic AI, is beginning to change how retailers think about the customer journey.
From Looking Back to Understanding Intent
Traditional personalisation has largely relied on what a customer has done before. Previous purchases, browsing behaviour and other customer data can inform recommendations and experiences.
The next stage is more forward-looking. Agentic AI can use real-time signals to understand what a customer may be looking for at a particular moment and determine how the experience should respond.
One example is Adobe and Merkle’s Experience Concierge for Retail, which brings specialist AI capabilities and agents across the customer journey. Rather than relying on a generic product-led journey, the approach is designed to tailor the digital experience to individual customer intent in real time.
Instead of presenting every customer with the same catalogue or segment-based journey, retailers can create more individualised interactions across the customer journey. But technology alone is not enough.
Retailers first need the right data architecture and structures to bring customer signals together and activate them at the right time. They also need ways of working that allow teams to experiment, learn from controlled groups and scale what works.
That makes experimentation as important as the technology itself.
Can Personalisation Deliver Measurable Growth?
For retailers, the case for investing in AI ultimately comes down to business outcomes. A more relevant interaction can encourage customers to explore additional products, add more to their basket and complete a purchase.
Over time, a better experience can also influence whether customers return and deepen their relationship with a brand.
The ambition around AI-led retail experiences is significant, with potential estimates including a 25% increase in conversion rates, a 25% to 40% increase in basket size, and a 25% to 45% reduction in customer experience costs.
At the same time, customer expectations are expanding beyond traditional websites and apps.
Search is changing too.
Consumers are increasingly using social platforms, visual search and LLM-based tools to discover products and recommendations. As those platforms move closer to commerce, brands will need to think about how they appear, how they are positioned and how that discovery ultimately turns into a purchase.
The Search-to-Commerce Shift
For retailers, this means visibility can no longer be limited to traditional search engines.
A customer may discover a product through TikTok, ask an AI platform for recommendations or use an image to find something similar. The channel may change, but the expectation remains the same: the experience should feel connected.
That creates another challenge for brands. As more digital channels emerge, customers will increasingly expect the experience across those channels to remain consistent with the brand they already know.
These questions sit at the heart of the latest episode of the Martech Podcast, where Andreas Skopal, Chief Executive Officer, Merkle MENA, explores how agentic AI, real-time personalisation and AI-powered search are changing retail, and what brands need to put in place to keep pace with changing customer expectations.
Watch the full conversation to hear more about the changing retail journey, the role of AI in personalisation, and what the shift towards AI-led discovery could mean for brands and customers.
ALSO READ: From Chatbots to Concierge: Inside Retail’s Agentic CXM Shift
