Asked whether consumers would allow an AI agent to select and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without visiting a website or store, Johnson said, “Honestly, nobody’s going to do that.”
For purchases like laptops, he argued, consumers still want firsthand experience. Weight, screen quality and device size are difficult to evaluate through an AI interface alone, even if an agent can help narrow the field.
“AI will never be able to have you physically experience a product,” Johnson said.
Instead, Johnson expects AI to become a stronger research layer before a purchase. Agents could answer questions, compare options and help shoppers arrive at a store with a clearer idea of what they want.
“They’ll just become more informed shoppers when they come to the store,” he said.
That distinction reflects Johnson’s experience building Apple’s retail network after joining the company in 2000. Apple Stores were designed as more than checkout points. Customers could try products, learn how to use them and return for technical help, creating a retail experience that depended heavily on the interaction between employees and shoppers.
Johnson revisits that approach in his new book, “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius.” He said competitors often copied visible elements of Apple’s stores, including glass-heavy designs, open layouts and Genius Bar-style service concepts, without necessarily reproducing the employee model behind them.
“The secret sauce for Apple has always been its people, the people in the store, and how they treat the customer,” Johnson said.
Apple Store employees are not paid on commission, according to Johnson. He said the idea was to reduce pressure to make a sale and instead focus employees on identifying what a customer actually needed.
That emphasis on human interaction also shapes his skepticism toward agentic commerce. Johnson does not reject AI itself. He described himself as “a real believer in AI” and “an AI optimist,” and said he believes Steve Jobs would also have embraced the technology.
His disagreement is narrower: AI can improve shopping without removing people from the process entirely. “There’s no substitute for human intuition,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s retail record after Apple has been less successful. He became chief executive of J.C. Penney in 2011 and was removed less than two years later after sales fell. Johnson now says he moved too aggressively and treated the retailer more like a startup than a turnaround. “I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation,” he said.
He later founded Enjoy Technology, which brought technology products and setup services directly to customers’ homes. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion.
Those experiences give Johnson’s argument a complicated backdrop. His Apple tenure helped establish a retail model centered on product experience and customer service, while his later attempts to apply new approaches elsewhere produced very different results.
The larger disagreement now centers on how much purchasing consumers are actually willing to delegate. Johnson’s laptop example focuses on a category where physical experience can influence the decision. AI agents may still be better suited to purchases where shoppers already know what they want or where little hands-on evaluation is required.
For Johnson, however, the more immediate shift is not the disappearance of stores. It is the arrival of customers who walk into them after doing far more research with AI.
That would make agents an increasingly important part of the buying process without making them the entire buying process — a considerably narrower vision than the fully automated shopping experience Google, OpenAI and others are working to enable.
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Apple.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
