AI agents will run your store—if retailers can fix the basics first

Amazon, Shopify, and other platforms are pushing autonomous AI agents as the next e-commerce frontier, but seven industry leaders admit the foundational problems—fragmented data, poor product feeds, clunky integrations—remain unsolved. The bottleneck is operational, not technical. Most retailers cannot get their inventory, pricing, and customer data clean enough for any agent to operate effectively. Early winners will be those disciplined enough to fix their operational plumbing first, not those with the most sophisticated AI.