The standard process for purchasing fresh produce online has been universally acknowledged as a clunky, uninspiring task. Shoppers log on, sort by price, filter for organic and type keywords into rigid search bars. According to David Ingram, group chief product officer for Rezolve AI, this is a consistently missed opportunity for retailers.
“The devices we use today in that user interface, in that UX [user experience] for e-commerce, are very transactional: search, click, tap keywords, maybe semantic search, filters, sorting, pagination. It’s [sort of] actually very transactional, and it’s not a very creative experience,” Ingram says during a recent Coresight Research webinar detailing its latest Agentic Commerce Playbook study.
By contrast, Ingram notes that visiting a high-end physical store is a highly dynamic process.
“The shopping experience when you go into a store — like a really good store ... it’s actually quite a creative process, isn’t it?” he asks.
The industry is now on the cusp of an explosion in agentic commerce — a paradigm shift where consumers rely on autonomous, conversational AI agents to discover, evaluate and eventually buy goods. Coresight Research data estimates that this new AI ecosystem is quickly becoming a “trillion-dollar number that is influenced, mediated, orchestrated … however you want to think about it, by an agentic experience.”
Bridging the Produce Bottleneck
Fresh produce has historically been online grocery’s biggest bottleneck because shoppers do not trust third-party human pickers to judge the ripeness of fruit or the freshness of greens. Agentic commerce seeks to eliminate this friction through natural dialogue. Instead of guessing based on static images, a shopper could theoretically tell an AI agent to build a menu and source ingredients that are ripe exactly when needed.
Deborah Weinswig, CEO and founder of Coresight Research, points out that this hyperdescriptive, voice-and-text conversation will change the fundamental math of retail operations.
“I also believe [a] thing very important is that we’re going to see a significant decline in returns because consumers are going to have a better understanding of what it is that they’re purchasing,” Weinswig says.
She likens typing on existing e-commerce sites to a “staccato“ experience, noting that when consumers can truly speak naturally, the clarity of what they are ordering skyrockets.
The 4% Conversion Chasm
Despite the immense promise, the grocery industry has a substantial hill to climb to achieve fully autonomous purchasing. While Coresight’s data reveals that a large majority of consumers use AI for initial discovery, almost none use it to check out.
As Weinswig notes from the study, a “substantially large cohort, 60% of shoppers [are] leveraging [generative] AI to shop. But direct purchases, as I would have expected, are still at a minimal amount,” with only “4% of consumers cited having completed a purchase using Gen. AI.” She describes the low transaction number as “checking out inside of an LLM [large language model].”
Ingram doesn’t think this gap is driven by consumer paranoia or lack of faith in the tech.
“I have also heard it said that the next challenge is trust. And I do think it’s a real thing, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the highest bar because as humans we’re actually ... quite trusting of technology,” Ingram says.
Instead, Ingram pins the blame on the early phase of enterprise retail infrastructure: “I think the real friction point is tech maturity and adoption. We’re still very much at the start of the curve.”
A New Grocery Landscape
As generative AI moves from an informational novelty to a true revenue driver, the grocery sector will have to rethink how it feeds product inventory and metadata to external AI agents. If a grocery retailer’s real-time inventory system isn’t perfectly structured, an outbound AI agent looking to buy organic gala apples for a consumer simply won’t know the store has them in stock.
For grocers who adapt quickly, the payoff will be impressive, transforming a cold, digital transaction back into an experience that mirrors the sensory joy of open-air markets. As Ingram says: “The idea of a Gen. AI shopping assistant brings the promise that I can have a much more ... sort of beautiful, natural, creative, satisfying shopping experience.”
