While Silicon Valley is spending billions to have AI agents shop for us, the man who pioneered Apple’s retail stores believes the industry is overestimating the number of purchases people will hand over to machines, and he believes brick-and-mortar stores will continue to thrive.
Ron Johnson, 66, has heard predictions about the demise of physical retail before. He joined Apple in 2000 to build its retail business as online shopping was beginning to take off, and later helped create a network of stores that became central to how Apple sells its products and connects with customers.
“AI is a new technology that will improve the online shopping experience,” Johnson said in an interview. “But I don’t know if that’s going to change the way we shop.”
Johnson’s opinion comes as some of the world’s biggest tech companies are trying to push AI deeper into shopping, betting that agents can further automate the way we find and buy items, a concept commonly called trade agent. Google is making that effort with its Universal Trading Protocola standard designed to help AI agents take consumers from product discovery to checkout. OpenAI, meanwhile, is turn ChatGPT into a shopping destination where users can research, compare, and in some cases even purchase products without leaving the chatbot.
When asked if he could imagine someone allowing an agent to pick out and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without even visiting a website or store, Johnson was unequivocal: “Honestly, no one is going to do that.”
Buying a laptop, he argued, is too personal a purchase to simply delegate to an AI agent. Buyers want to feel its weight, see the screen and decide what size is best for them. AI can narrow down the options, Johnson told TechCrunch. He added that many consumers would still want to experience the product themselves before spending that amount of money.
“AI will never be able to make you physically experience a product,” Johnson said. Instead, he hopes agents will better inform consumers before they enter a store. “They’ll just become more informed shoppers when they come to the store.”
Johnson’s conviction stems from a decision Apple made more than two decades ago. Apple’s physical stores, he said, were designed not only as places to buy Macs, but also as places where people could try products, learn how to use them and come back for help when something went wrong.
Some of those bets are reviewed in Shop different: How retail revealed Apple’s geniusJohnson’s new book on building Apple’s retail operations alongside Steve Jobs. Competitors, he said, borrowed Apple’s design with lots of glass, open layouts and even versions of the Genius Bar, but often missed people.
“Apple’s secret sauce has always been its people, the people in the store and how they treat the customer,” Johnson said.
Apple Store employees do not receive commissions, Johnson said, unlike the sales culture common in much of retail. The idea, he said, was to remove the pressure to sell and instead have employees figure out what the customer really needs.
After leaving Apple, Johnson took over JC Penney in 2011 with an ambitious plan to reinvent the struggling department store chain. he was overthrown less than two years after sales plummeted.
Johnson now says he tried to change too much, too quickly, without involving employees or customers. Apple stores had effectively been a startup that evolved alongside the company’s products. JC Penney, on the other hand, was a radical change that required a different approach.
“I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a transformation,” he recalled.
Johnson later returned to the startup worldfounding Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company that brought technology products and configuration services directly to customers’ homes. the start-up filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion.
For all his skepticism about how AI will reshape shopping, Johnson remains optimistic about the technology itself. “I’m a true believer in AI. I’m an AI optimist,” he said.
He believes Jobs would have also embraced AI, but not as a substitute for human judgment. “There is no substitute for human intuition,” Johnson said, recalling Jobs’ belief in bringing smart people together to discuss problems and find new ways to address them.
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