Manchester Statistical Society

AI, Agents and the Future of Shopping: How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape Retail, by Simon Ellis, a Head of AI Transformation and Enterprise Architecture - Pets at Home

Abstract
AI is beginning to change commerce in a much more fundamental way than simply improving recommendations, search or customer service. We are moving towards a world of agentic commerce, where AI agents can understand what consumers want, research products and services, compare alternatives, negotiate trade-offs and increasingly complete transactions on their behalf.
This talk explores what happens when the traditional shopping journey starts to disappear and the interface between the consumer and the retailer becomes an intelligent agent.
We will look at the rapid development of AI-powered shopping experiences from organisations including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify and others, alongside emerging approaches that could dynamically reconstruct digital experiences around an individual consumer's intent rather than forcing them to navigate conventional websites.
The implications for retailers are significant. If an AI agent becomes the primary way that customers discover and select products, traditional advantages such as website design, search rankings, advertising, merchandising and even brand loyalty may start to work very differently. Retailers will need to consider how they make their products, services, inventory, pricing and propositions understandable and accessible not just to humans, but to machines acting on their behalf.
The session will examine the opportunities and risks from both sides of this emerging ecosystem: what agentic commerce could mean for consumers, how retailers may need to respond, where value could shift within the industry, and which organisations are positioning themselves to control the next generation of commerce.
It will also consider some more provocative questions: What happens when customers stop visiting websites? Who owns the customer relationship when an AI agent is making the decision? And in an agentic economy, are retailers selling to people — or increasingly selling to other agents?

Professional biography
Simon Ellis is an AI transformation and enterprise architecture leader with extensive experience helping large organisations translate emerging technology into practical business transformation.
His career has spanned enterprise architecture, technology strategy, digital transformation, retail and AI, including senior leadership roles responsible for enterprise architecture and AI transformation. He has worked extensively within the retail and consumer sectors, exploring how AI, autonomous agents and new operating models can reshape customer experiences, organisational capabilities and the future workforce.
Simon has been closely involved in the practical adoption of generative and agentic AI, from experimentation and architecture through to enterprise implementation and governance. His work increasingly focuses on what comes after today's wave of AI assistants: organisations in which networks of people and AI agents collaborate to make decisions, execute work and continuously adapt.
He is also developing new approaches to modelling and simulating agentic organisations and consumer behaviour, exploring how businesses can move beyond traditional analytics and forecasting towards understanding how customers, organisations and autonomous agents may interact in future scenarios.
Simon is a regular speaker on AI, enterprise architecture, the future of retail and agentic transformation, and has contributed to industry events and discussions around the practical implications of autonomous AI. His work on enterprise agentic AI has also been featured in Microsoft presentations and industry material, and he was named among the Top 30 Retail Disruptors & Innovators in 2026.