eBay is using agentic AI to serve personalized recommendations.
Agentic AI has not created the same buzz in retail as generative AI but is becoming an important enterprise tool.
The latest wave of artificial intelligence evolution, agentic AI builds upon the prescriptive capabilities of generative AI to streamline enterprise workflows even further.
Generative AI, which is based on machine learning, can create new content and ideas and create recommendations based on analysis of volumes of data in near-real-time that were previously too big to evaluate.
Agentic AI goes a step beyond by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results. For example, an agentic AI pricing solution could adjust prices based on factors specific to a local store or an agentic AI chatbot could automatically issue a customer refund or flag a complaint for fraud depending on its deep-dive analysis of the situation.
Agentic AI was widely available at both the recent NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show and Shoptalk 2025 retail technology conferences, but not the dominant theme.
Instead, as AI in general becomes more an expected component of the retail enterprise, agentic is fitting right in both the front and back ends, with shopping, product recommendations, and supply chain operations emerging as three major areas where it is being applied by retailers:
Shopping
In one significant example of how retailers are streamlining the customer shopping process using agentic AI, Amazon is beta testing a new agentic AI-based shopping feature known as “Buy for Me” in its iOS and Android shopping app for a subset of U.S. customers.
When customers participating in the beta look for branded items in the search bar in the Amazon shopping app, they see relevant results from Amazon and third-party sellers in its store, and in some cases, additional relevant products from other stores in a separate section of search results labeled, “Shop brand sites directly.”
Customers can link directly to these sites, or in some cases, will see a link to Buy for Me. To shop brand sites directly using Buy for Me, customers tap on an item that says Buy for Me in search results listed under “Shop brand sites directly.”
They are then taken to a product detail page within the Amazon shopping app. This page provides relevant product information, similar to product detail pages for items Amazon sells.
https://chainstoreage.com/how-agentic-ai-finding-its-place-retail