Department Stores of the Future Are AI Agents

There’s a little of my mother in my grocery cart. Downy Fabric Softener, Reynolds Wrap and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are brands I still buy without thinking. They were always in her kitchen, symbols of quality and trust. Price didn’t matter. Once a brand earned her loyalty, she stuck with it. I’ve carried that habit with me. Strong brands don’t just sell products. They create memories.

That power is now being tested.

Search engines, marketplaces and AI agents flatten the landscape. They don’t know what your mother always bought. They don’t care. Search and marketplaces optimize around algorithms and ad dollars. No one knows yet how agents decide what gets surfaced.

As discovery shifts to GPT models and agents, brands risk becoming nothing more than SKUs, sorted by invisible algorithms and API calls. That may not be what consumers want. It’s certainly not the world brands want to live in.

Brands want a fair shot at being considered. Consumers want the efficiency of an agent that can collapse a million options into a shortlist they can trust. The moment for brands is now. They can define the experience, shape the prompt and decide how they show up. The ones that act will own the relationship. The rest will be invisible.

The Conversationally Curious Consumer

OpenAI and Perplexity have shown that consumers are curious about agents that can shop. In the few months since each launched their shopping assistants, PYMNTS Intelligence finds that half of millennials and Gen Z would let an agent plan and book their next trip and even build their grocery list. More than a third would hand over their gift buying to an agent, trusting it to pick the right items from their prompts.

What those numbers show is the desire to simplify complexity and save time.

Shoppers want agents to do the browsing and editing; they don’t have the time or patience to do themselves. What keeps many on the sidelines is uncertainty about how agents decide and whether trusted brands will appear in the mix.

That tension defines shopping today, but it isn’t new. For more than a century, the tradeoff has been the same. Someone else curates, or the consumer sifts through hundreds of options.

The history of the department store shows how curation once solved that problem. It could become the blueprint for commerce in an age where agents do the shopping.

Department Store 1.0

When Harry Gordon Selfridge opened his London store in 1909, he didn’t just build a store. He created an experience. Until then, shopping was purely transactional. The customer asked, paid and walked next door to do the same thing. Selfridge made browsing fun and buying aspirational. And innovative. He installed escalators for the first time that moved people through multiple floors, placed perfume and cosmetics by the entrance to set a welcoming tone and turned his windows into invitations for passersby to step inside.

The products mattered, but the presentation mattered more. Associates knew their customers, tailored selections to their tastes and made shopping an experience that encouraged them to buy more.

Department stores built their brands on curation. Their customers were the prompts. Merchants read those signals and adjusted displays to turn browsers into buyers.

The Shift to the Endless Aisle

Online marketplaces pulled the department store into the digital age, promising everything under one virtual roof. Access was democratized. Whatever a consumer wanted was a query away. Convenience became the edge, selection the value proposition.

Scale followed. Amazon lists 600 million products, Walmart more than 420 million. Google made the web searchable. Even the largest department stores once carried only a few hundred thousand items. Shopping became transactional again: query, scroll, click, buy.

But endless aisles came with a cost. Free shipping, logistics, and discounts required subsidy. Marketplaces and search engines discovered the bigger profit pool was selling access to eyeballs. Algorithms, keywords and ad dollars replaced associates.

As models diverged, department stores lost ground. Marketplaces had endless choice and better economics. Direct-to-consumer brands scaled faster without real estate.

Experience and curation once drove the sale in the physical world. But convenience won in a world of connected devices and apps and time-starved consumers.

Today, agents sit at the crossroads of a new era of commerce.

Marketplaces collapsed time, making discovery and purchase happen in one place. But endless options without curation left shoppers overwhelmed.

Department stores solved that problem in their prime.

Agents could again.

But that depends on the playbook they use to do it.

Agents can copy the marketplace model, layering prompts over ad spend. Or they can reinvent the department store in an agentic age. The agent can replicate that trusted associate who knew the customer, curated across brands and price points, and closed the sale based on what the customer wanted to buy, not what advertisers wanted them to see.

Amazon won by collapsing time.

Agents can win by collapsing choice. Offering the endless access of the marketplace with the curation of a skilled associate. At scale, in seconds.

The Prompt in Action

Here’s how it might play out.

A prompt might be: “Wedding in Upstate New York, late October. Outfits for rehearsal dinner, black-tie ceremony for a work colleague, and Sunday brunch. Budget $1,200, with $400–$550 for the black-tie dress. No black or white. Saturday dress must match a purple and chocolate brown silk shawl. Deliver by next Thursday.”

The agent doesn’t flood the shopper with irrelevant options or bury them in sponsored results. It shows what fits. The right mix, the right budget, the right timing. Not an endless aisle, but a curated rack built to the prompt.

What goes on that rack depends on brands. The ones strong enough to be named. The ones trusted enough to be recalled. Without that, the agent fills in blanks. With it, the agent builds around the brands the consumer already values.

That is Department Store 3.0. The discovery of the department store and the reach of the marketplace, powered by algorithms and prompts. Convenience and curation defined by the consumer.

Which is why brand strength matters more, not less, in an agentic commerce world. Agents may own the interface, but only brands strong enough to be remembered, requested or demanded will make it onto the rack. The rest will disappear.

The Power of Brands

Brand recall has always been the invisible currency of commerce. The brands consumers can name are the ones they buy. Recognition seals the deal at the point of sale. Price matters, but memory matters more. Recall gets a brand into the set. Recognition puts it in the cart to come home.

But recall isn’t automatic. It is earned through consistent performance. Recall might win the first try, but quality keeps it there.

That dynamic has never been more important when agents do the shopping. If a consumer doesn’t name a brand in a prompt, the agent decides.

Consumers expect agents to filter. But they also expect that what appears is reliable, safe and worth the price. Brands that wall themselves off from agents risk losing relevance. Those that open must do so in ways that protect trust. Distribution will be defined by this tension. Access must balance with trust and credibility.

Agents won’t exist in a vacuum, nor will they do this for free. They will have to monetize their role as gatekeepers to a sale. To make Department Store 3.0 reach its fullest potential, they need a model better than ad dollars and sponsored placements.

Brands, Not Bystanders

Brands have always needed a front door. For decades, it was the department store, where consumers discovered trusted labels alongside new ones.

Marketplaces changed that. They offered consumers endless choice, and over time, they gave brands storefronts. But visibility was auctioned off. Discovery wasn’t organic. It was bought.

Agents can reset the rules. Curation, not spend, can become the currency. Shopper prompts decide what goes on the rack. Brands with trust, recall and relevance earn their way in because consumers name them.

That doesn’t mean brands retreat. Many are embedding agents into their own sites and apps to own the customer conversation. Luxury brands will stay closed, selling only their own products to protect exclusivity. Others will open, where agents act as stylists mixing labels and price points, even outside of their own stores to become the trusted storefronts for the curated experience their shoppers may want.

Marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart will stay powerful because of their scale. But scale isn’t enough. Their own agents must deliver curation as well as convenience to maintain share.

In Department Store 3.0, shelf space and ad spend won’t decide. Prompts will. Strong brands will endure because consumers still care enough to name them. That’s always been the contract between brands and consumers. And it doesn’t have to break in a world of agents. In fact, it becomes more critical. Because when agents do the shopping, the brand may be the only thing that matters.

What do you think?

Until NEXT time.

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