Agentic Commerce is here.
Customers are using AI assistants to check prices, gather details, and evaluate options long before they reach your site. And while many retail leaders feel confident about their readiness for this shift, the research shows a significant confidence gap:
91% of retail leaders feel prepared for AI, but less than half can act on customer signals as they happen.
This confidence gap is becoming yet another expression of the Growth Gap in retail, where customer expectations surge ahead, but systems struggle to keep up.
Why retailers feel ready for AI, but aren't
This gap becomes clearer when you look at how the shopping journey has changed. Buyers aren’t moving through it alone anymore. Retailers see this happening, with 77% saying their customer journeys are already hybrid, blending human and AI-agent decisions.
Awareness is there, but readiness is uneven.
Where the gap starts to show
As these journeys speed up, technology limits become harder to hide. Teams working with slow or stitched-together systems feel that pressure first. This pressure shows up fastest in how first-party data is handled.
Retailers have more customer data than ever, yet just over 50% use first-party data to power real-time decisions. Signals exist. The challenge is turning them into action in the moment they’re needed. The data is available, but the systems meant to activate it fall behind.
And when leaders explain what slows them down, they point to the same issue: the systems they rely on can’t keep up with how quickly shoppers and AI agents now move.
Those limitations aren’t new. They’re the result of earlier technical decisions that weren’t built for AI-mediated journeys. That’s where the report spends much of its focus: what those choices were, and how modern, modular architectures change the equation.
“There are a lot of new things happening every day, week, and month in retail, so locking yourself into one particular stack is very costly. And I don’t mean from a budget standpoint, but from a results standpoint.”
- Mihir Nanavati
BlueConic GM Product and Technology
Inside the report
A quick read of the real disconnect shaping AI in retail, including:
Where retailers think they’re strong, and the places the data shows they’re not (especially around real-time response)
How AI agents are quietly rewriting the first half of the shopping journey, and what that means for visibility
Why first-party data is piling up without turning into action, and the operational reasons behind it
The specific technical decisions that are holding teams back from reacting when signals actually happen
How the retailers who are keeping pace are structuring their systems differently
If there’s a thread running through the findings, it’s this: customers and their AI assistants are moving in real time, and most retail infrastructure isn’t built for that pace.
This report is a chance to see where that gap shows up, and what it takes to narrow it.
FAQs
What is the AI confidence gap in retail? It’s the difference between how ready retailers say they are for AI-powered shopping and how capable their systems actually are when real-time moments happen.
Why is AI-mediated shopping important? Customers are already using AI tools for discovery and decision-making. Retailers who aren’t prepared risk missing the earliest (and most influential) moments of the journey.
What holds retailers back from real-time relevance? Mostly infrastructure. Many retailers rely on slow or disconnected systems that can’t activate data quickly enough.
Who is this report for? Retail leaders, digital teams, and anyone responsible for personalization, AI strategy, customer experience, or growth.