Anthropic’s retail AI push: who owns the customer relationship?
Chris Jones, managing director at PSE Consulting said:“Anthropic giving retailers the tools to build their own shopping agents marks another step towards AI becoming embedded in the transaction journey. Following ChatGPT’s move into agentic commerce, Anthropic is now putting the technology directly into retailers’ hands, allowing them to build agents that can recommend products, assemble baskets and support customers through to checkout.”
“I would be cautious about interpreting that as a future where every retailer needs to own the shopping agent. Recent PSE Consulting research across 4,250 consumers in the UK, US, France and Germany found that 74% prefer an independent AI assistant for shopping, while only 10% want AI embedded within a single retail or delivery platform. Consumers want an agnostic agent at the top of the funnel, helping them search, compare and build a shortlist, before moving to a merchant or marketplace they trust to complete the purchase.”
“That said, I can see a world where independent and on-platform agents coexist. Retailers and marketplaces have a strong incentive to build capable agents because they can use proprietary data, customer relationships and fulfilment infrastructure to personalise the final stages of the journey. Marketplaces also have the scale to invest heavily in agent development and deploy those capabilities across large customer bases.”
“That creates a more difficult environment for smaller merchants. Building a sophisticated proprietary agent requires data, technology and investment that many smaller businesses will struggle to match. Independent agents could therefore become just as important to merchant visibility as retailer-owned agents are to conversion.”
“Consumers stand to gain greater choice and more useful assistance across the shopping journey. Merchants gain new ways to convert and retain customers, but they will need to compete both for inclusion in independent AI shortlists and for engagement once a shopper reaches their own platform.”