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While Silicon Valley is spending billions to make AI agents shop for us, the man who pioneered Apple’s retail stores thinks the industry is overestimating how much of shopping people will hand over to machines — and believes physical 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 went on to help create a store network 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 that it’s going to change which way we shop.” Johnson’s view comes as some of the world’s biggest tech companies are trying to push AI deeper into shopping, betting that agents can automate more of how we find and buy items — a concept commonly called agentic commerce. Google is making that push with its Universal Commerce Protocol, a standard designed to help AI agents take consumers from product discovery to checkout. OpenAI, meanwhile, is turning ChatGPT into a shopping destination where users can research, compare, and, in some cases, even buy products without leaving the chatbot. Asked whether he could imagine someone letting an agent choose and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without ever visiting a website or store, Johnson was unequivocal: “Honestly, nobody’s 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 display and decide which size works for them. AI may narrow the choices, Johnson told TechCrunch. He added that many consumers would still want to experience the product themselves before spending that kind of money. “AI will never be able to have you physically experience a product,” Johnson said. Instead, he expects agents to better inform consumers before they walk into 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 return for help when something went wrong. Some of those bets are revisited in Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius, Johnson’s new book about building Apple’s retail operations alongside Steve Jobs. Competitors, he said, borrowed Apple’s glass-heavy design, open layouts, and even versions of the Genius Bar, but often missed the people. “The secret sauce for Apple has always been its people, the people in the store, and how they treat the customer,” Johnson said. Apple Store employees are not paid on commission, Johnson said, unlike the sales culture common across much of retail. The idea, he said, was to remove the pressure to sell and instead have employees figure out what a customer actually needed. After leaving Apple, Johnson took over J.C. Penney in 2011 with an ambitious plan to reinvent the struggling department-store chain. He was ousted less than two years later after sales plunged. Johnson now says he tried to change too much, too quickly, without bringing employees and customers along. Apple’s stores had effectively been a startup that evolved alongside the company’s products. J.C. Penney, on the other hand, was a turnaround that required a different approach. “I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation,” he recalled. Johnson later returned to the startup world, founding Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company that brought technology products and setup services directly to customers’ homes. The startup 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 bullish on the technology itself. “I’m a real believer in AI. I’m an AI optimist,” he said. He believes Jobs would have embraced AI, too, but not as a substitute for human judgment. “There’s no substitute for human intuition,” Johnson said, recalling Jobs’ belief in bringing smart people together to debate problems and find new ways of looking at them.
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