AI will change the way you shop in 2026 |
Imagine this: One day, you won’t have to waste hours of your life doing your most arduous, least favorite forms of shopping. You know what I’m talking about—buying Christmas presents for distant aunts, getting supplies for your kid’s birthday, ordering groceries for dinner.
In the near future, you’ll empower your AI agent to tackle the task, then off it will go, identifying the right items, comparing prices, and—most impressively—making the purchase for you. Within hours, a tin of your aunt’s favorite biscuits, the correct number of Peppa Pig plates, and a bag of groceries will arrive at your doorstep.
We’re not quite there yet, but experts say that this future is much closer than you think. Consumers are incorporating AI into their shopping at a meteoric pace, tapping agents to discover products and making purchases based on their suggestions. Shopify, which runs online stores for more than five million brands, has found that AI-driven traffic had grown sevenfold this year compared to last, and AI-driven purchases have increased by 11 times.
In November, Adobe determined that three-quarters of all purchases made on a computer were referred by AI, as were a quarter of those made on a phone. “The likelihood to purchase if you come from an AI source platform is higher than a non-AI source right now,” says Vivek Pandya, director of digital insights at Adobe. “That’s happened in a very short period of time.”
This spike in AI adoption suggests that 2026 is going to be a transformational year for shopping. We’re shifting away from searching for products on Google and discovering them on social media, and instead we’re going to start our shopping journeys from within an AI system. Now, retailers and brands are scrambling to adapt to this reality, beefing up their technological capabilities for this new era. Fully autonomous buying will be here before you know it.
Since the late 1990s, shopping on the internet has followed the same script. We opened Google, typed in what we wanted to buy, then scrolled through endless rows of links before making a purchase. Finding a black cashmere sweater means scanning through rows of thumbnails—the digital equivalent of digging through an enormous bin of inventory in a backroom. “The cognitive load that the consumer has to deal with day in and day........