Are agentic stores the future?
Swap launched the first dedicated agentic storefront recently, an early outlier that raises many strategic questions for brands and how they are accessed online.
The pitch is pretty straightforward. Brands have spent the last two decades building and refining websites that are typically found through search engines (Google), with customers navigating now-familiar UX patterns and journeys optimised to the hilt.
But that pattern is now starting to come apart as customers use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to discover and access products online, and right now, all of these platforms are designed to keep the conversation within their channels.
Swap argues that this is structurally misaligned with what brands actually want. The LLMs currently have no commercial incentive to send visitors to a brand’s site, but one notable data point is that even when the LLMs win the discovery moment, the conversion moment still belongs to the brand, provided the brand has somewhere worth sending the customer.
Walmart’s own testing of around 200,000 items found that conversions inside ChatGPT ran at roughly a third of the rate seen when customers clicked through to walmart.com, a comparison Swap itself acknowledges. Sephora’s ChatGPT app and Gap’s Gemini partnership are both public, but their conversion numbers aren’t.
Swap has built a dedicated AI agent that lives on a sister site, separate from the brands’ .com sites. It accesses the same product data, sounds like the brand, and walks a customer from discovery through to checkout, with features like virtual try-on and voice along the way.
They claim this is converting at twice the industry rate, which is a strong headline, but the details behind this claim are sparse. That’s not to say this shouldn’t be taken seriously, and the rise of LLMs to surface information means humans using AI to discover products is going to be a huge area of disruption over the coming years.
Swap also has named launch partners, including SIMKHAI, Retrofête, Odd Muse, Studio Nicholson, and Manors Golf, alongside more than twenty others, so we should have clear data from these projects within the next year.
The category is real because the underlying change is real. We have regularly written about sites moving from visit-based design to agent-led discovery, with customers starting to ask rather than browse, expecting a useful answer rather than a list of ten thousand results ranked by ad spend. If you are a brand that doesn’t have its own agentic surface within the next few years, you will end up wholesaling to whichever LLM the customer asks first.
The more interesting question for a brand thinking about this seriously is not whether to buy Swap, but whether it has a single, coherent answer for its agentic surface across the whole customer journey. If not, now is the time to consider this.
Swap is a useful artefact for that conversation. The strategic question it forces every retail leadership team to answer this quarter is the right one. Where will your customer find you when they stop typing into a search box and start asking an agent, and what do they meet when they arrive?
If the honest answer is they will hit our website like they always have, it is later than you think.
Brand-owned AI surfaces, from discovery through to end of life, are at the core of what we have been building towards at Human Kind. If you’re working through how the pieces fit together, we should talk.