Consumers increasingly tap agentic AI to shop, but brand trust remains strongest in physical stores. Quad/Graphics, a marketing experience company that solves complex marketing challenges for its clients, and The Harris Poll today announced the results of a new national survey revealing widespread consumer distrust for sponsored results in agentic AI shopping platforms.

The new rules of retail trust in the age of AI survey, a continuation of the 2025 “Return of Touch” report, indicates that price-conscious consumers are using AI for convenience and to reduce uncertainty in a rapidly changing shopping landscape but still have concerns about trust and data transparency. According to the research, shoppers continue to have high confidence in in-store experiences, especially regarding item quality and pricing.

Despite continued pressure on margins and growth, renewed momentum is emerging in European grocery in 2026—with private label, adjacencies, M&A, and AI opening new pockets of opportunity. The year 2025 was characterized by low-growth stabilization under sustained profitability pressure. In Europe, grocery sales grew by 3.4 percent—consumer prices continued to increase moderately by 2.9 percent, while volume grew by 0.6 percent, with marginal downtrading at –0.1 percent. While cost and margin pressure remained the top concern for CEOs, overall executive sentiment improved, with a majority expecting market conditions to remain stable or improve. Consumer behavior also showed emerging markers of stabilization, with only limited shifts in spending patterns compared to 2024—private label continued to gain relevance, reaching a 40 percent share, while growth of online shopping decelerated.

This survey report reveals that while organizations understand the importance of last mile delivery, operational transformation still hasn’t followed. The last mile has changed, but many organizations are still treating last-mile delivery as a cost center, tracking metrics like cost per delivery, carrier rates, and route efficiency without considering the customer experience. 

It’s an approach that doesn’t reflect reality. For many customers, delivery is now the only part of the supply chain they actually experience—and it directly shapes whether they return.

Furniture retail is entering a pivotal year. Tariffs, sluggish demand, and rising content costs are putting pressure on margins. Discounting alone won’t move buyers in 2026 — trust and visual clarity will. Photorealistic visualization, real-time configuration, and AI-generated content are now primary conversion levers. The brands gaining share are turning PDPs into digital showrooms: rotating products, configuring options instantly, and placing furniture in real spaces through AR.

AI already helps consumers discover products. Soon, it will purchase them too. Agentic commerce introduces autonomous agents that can research, compare, and complete transactions on behalf of users. That’s why we’ve developed this playbook that explains what’s coming and how businesses should prepare.

What You’ll Learn

Understand the shift to Agentic commerce: Discover how AI agents are transforming the buying journey, from product discovery to autonomous purchasing

The beauty retailer has launched Ulta AI, a shopping assistant available on its website that soon will roll out to its app. The Ulta assortment will be shoppable within Google surfaces over the next month, including AI Mode in search and the Gemini app.

Brief:

Over the next month, Ulta Beauty is enabling agentic commerce in Google’s AI Mode in search and the Gemini app, the beauty retailer announced Wednesday. 

When e-commerce first took off in the 1990s, many established retailers faced an existential crisis: resist or embrace? Those that prioritized brick-and-mortar identities only over an online presence eventually fell behind in both sales and consumer mindshare. Conversely, retailers that aggressively invested in their own e-commerce platforms with clear differentiators and strong omnichannel presence were better positioned to flourish over time. Now retailers are facing a new source of disruption: agentic AI. AI agents, which can autonomously complete tasks on a user’s behalf, are poised to significantly transform how consumers discover, research, compare, and purchase products by completing some or all of these steps for them. Full agent-to-agent (A2A) commerce, in which the buyer’s and retailer’s AI agents transact directly, could eventually shortcut or bypass classic retail websites altogether as consumers rely on agents to determine the best value based on predetermined goals. For consumers, the potential upside is clear. Buyers can expect to find the best offers suited to their preferences, be it lower prices, attractive rewards, better services, faster shipping, or unique products, through one interface.

Did you know that 79% of service professionals say AI agent investment is essential to meet business demands? Read the Seventh State of Service report to get key insights from 6,500 service and field service professionals about where the industry is headed.

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