How AI is stealing your shopper—and what grocers can do about it

AI is reshaping grocery retail by changing how shoppers discover, evaluate and choose where to buy, creating new challenges for brand visibility, differentiation and ownership of the customer relationship.

• AI search is changing grocery discovery, meaning physical proximity and traditional search visibility may no longer be enough for retailers to earn shopper consideration.
• Grocers need clear brand propositions, authoritative digital content and distinctive customer experiences that help both shoppers and AI understand why they should be recommended.
• As agentic AI moves from recommending retailers to shopping on customers’ behalf, grocers risk losing control of the shopper relationship and becoming interchangeable sources of supply.

More importantly, it represents the foothills of an agentic AI age that could fundamentally change how shoppers choose where—and from whom—to buy.

Just as online shopping weakened the advantage of physical proximity, AI will challenge another accepted norm: that the retailer owns the relationship with the shopper. The grocers that respond now have an opportunity to strengthen that relationship. Those that don’t, risk becoming invisible.

Start with AI search. 44% of users now prefer using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity to search for information online. I recently asked an AI tool to recommend where, near my home, I should buy the ingredients for a Beef Wellington.

The answer was revealing. It recommended a local butcher for the beef and Fresh Thyme Market for everything else. The recommendations appeared to draw heavily from third-party sources, including a Superpages list of local grocery stores. Several major supermarket and big-box brands weren’t mentioned at all, including those closest to me.

That illustrates a problem grocers should pay attention to.: Iin an AI-mediated shopping journey, being nearby doesn’t guarantee being considered.

Initially, the impact may be limited to specific missions, particularly discovery-led categories where shoppers are looking for advice or inspiration. Longer term, grocers risk missing entire cohorts of shoppers for whom AI becomes their primary window for shopping.

Most grocery websites are transactional, optimized to help shoppers find products and place orders. They are often complemented by a digital or paper circular focused on price and promotion. Neither necessarily answers a more fundamental question: Why should a shopper choose this brand? AI search raises the importance of answering that question clearly.

The goal is not simply to add more keywords. Grocers need digital content that consistently explains what their brand is an authority on, what shopper needs it solves particularly well and why it deserves to be recommended.

But what a retailer says about itself is only part of the equation. AI systems also encounter signals from third-party sources, reviews and public conversations on platforms such as Reddit. Those conversations cannot simply be controlled by a marketing department. The experience either supports the brand promise or it doesn’t. That creates an additional challenge for portfolio companies.

A masterbrand such as Costco or Walmart can concentrate its efforts behind one brand. Kroger operates numerous regional banners accumulated over time. Those banners may have strong local familiarity, but many serve similar needs and, in some markets, sit alongside one another.

In an AI-driven discovery environment, that complexity could become a disadvantage. Investment and authority are spread across multiple brands at the same time that operational efficiency can make individual banners feel less distinctive. It may force portfolio retailers to become much clearer about the role each banner plays, the customers it serves and what makes it meaningfully different.

For chief commercial and marketing officers, three actions should start now:

Identify the questions and shopping missions for which your brand can authentically be the best answer. Then ensure the proposition and customer experience deliver against them. This creates a north star for both how the brand communicates and how it behaves.

Retailers should consistently articulate their proposition across owned digital channels in clear, conversational language. Traditional SEO and SEM remain important, but they now need to coexist with content that helps both people and AI understand why the brand deserves consideration. PR and partnerships matter too: credible third-party references can reinforce the claims made through owned channels.

Brand isn’t paint. It is more than a logo or identity system. National brands at competitive prices are table stakes. Grocers need a small number of distinctive interactions that make their proposition tangible and give customers something worth talking about. What shoppers say publicly about those experiences will increasingly matter to how brands are represented in AI-generated answers.

Grocers also need to prepare for a world in which AI doesn’t merely recommend where to shop; it shops on the customer’s behalf.

Who will own that agent? It could be a general-purpose AI platform. It could be a retailer with enormous scale. It could be an intermediary such as Instacart, or shoppers could use several specialized agents.

Consider Instacart. It already operates across thousands of retail banners and has extensive insight into shopping behavior. An AI agent could theoretically assemble a personalized basket across retailers, optimizing around the individual shopper rather than loyalty to a single banner.

If that model gains traction, the implications are significant. The agent—not the retailer—could increasingly own the shopper relationship. Easily substituted products would face greater price pressure, while private-label products and distinctive experiences could become more important reasons to choose a particular retailer.

That leads to a harder question every grocer should be asking: If an AI agent were choosing on behalf of my customer, why would it choose me?

AI visibility is an essential first step, but it won’t be sufficient. Grocers need to understand the different ways agentic commerce could develop, identify the moves that make sense across multiple scenarios and strengthen the assets that keep their brands destinations rather than interchangeable sources of supply.

Physical proximity still matters. So does fresh food, discovery and the store experience. But those advantages will become more powerful when paired with a distinctive brand that both shoppers and AI can understand. The battle for the shopper relationship is moving upstream. Grocers should make sure they are part of the answer.