Hajra Naz
Silicon Valley is spending billions right now. The goal is making AI agents shop on behalf of consumers. Still, one influential figure disagrees with this approach. The man who pioneered Apple’s retail stores thinks the industry is overestimating something specific. He believes people won’t hand over much of shopping to machines. He also believes physical stores will continue to thrive.
Ron Johnson, age 66, has heard predictions about retail’s demise before. He joined Apple back in 2000 to build its retail business. This happened as online shopping was just beginning to take off. He went on to help create a store network. That network became central to how Apple sells 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 emerges at a specific moment. Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are pushing AI deeper into shopping right now. They’re betting that agents can automate more of how people find and buy items. This concept is commonly called agentic commerce.
Read More: Apple’s New CEO Is Reviving a Strategy Steve Jobs Used 25 Years Ago
Google is pushing this trend forward with its Universal Commerce Protocol. This standard helps AI agents guide consumers from product discovery to checkout. OpenAI, meanwhile, is transforming ChatGPT into a shopping destination. Users can research, compare, and in some cases even buy products without leaving the chatbot.
Johnson was asked a specific question. Could he imagine someone letting an agent choose and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop? This would happen without ever visiting a website or physical store. Johnson’s response 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. They want to see the display. They need to decide which size actually works for them. AI may help narrow down the choices, Johnson explained. Still, he added that many consumers would want to experience the product themselves first. This matters especially 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 inform consumers better 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 were designed with multiple purposes in mind, he explained. They weren’t just places to buy Macs. They also served as places where people could try products. Customers could learn how to use them there too. They could return for help when something went wrong.
Read More: Tim Cook’s Parting Words Reveal that Apple Is in the Hands of a True Product Builder
Some of these ideas appear in Johnson’s new book. It’s called “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius.” The book covers building Apple’s retail operations alongside Steve Jobs. Johnson noted that competitors borrowed heavily from Apple’s approach.
That includes glass-heavy design. It includes open layouts. Some even created versions of the Genius Bar. Still, Johnson said these competitors often missed something important: 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 don’t work on commission, Johnson explained. This differs from the sales culture common across much of the retail industry. The idea, he said, was removing pressure to sell products. Instead, employees could focus on figuring out what customers actually needed.
After leaving Apple, Johnson took over J.C. Penney in 2011. He had an ambitious plan to reinvent the struggling department-store chain. However, he was ousted less than two years later. This happened after sales plunged significantly during his tenure.
Johnson now reflects on that experience differently. He says he tried changing too much, too quickly. He didn’t bring employees and customers along with him during that transition. Apple’s stores had effectively functioned like a startup. They evolved alongside the company’s products naturally. J.C. Penney, on the other hand, needed a turnaround. That required a fundamentally different approach.
“I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation,” he recalled.
Read More: Apple Reveals ‘Shocking Evidence’ Against Former Employee Accused of Sharing Data With OpenAI
Johnson later returned to the startup world. He founded Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company. This startup brought technology products and setup services directly to customers’ homes. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2022. It sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion afterward.
Despite his skepticism about how AI will reshape shopping, Johnson remains genuinely 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. He recalled Jobs’s belief in bringing smart people together. The goal was debating problems and finding new ways of looking at them.
