Back in February 2025, we commissioned a piece by contributing writer Callum Gill examining how artificial intelligence could help address the $18bn problem of cart abandonment and reshape product discovery in e-commerce.
Gill pointed to a longstanding structural issue in online retail: shoppers browse, hesitate and ultimately leave without purchasing.
“Traditional e-commerce search forces users to navigate a maze of filters, keyword inputs and pages of results that don’t always match their intent,” he wrote.
By contrast, AI-driven discovery could enable a more fluid interface. Gill argued that advances in “infinite canvas” design, gesture-based interactions and multimodal AI would allow shoppers to search not only with text, but also with voice, images and contextual signals.
Six months later, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Checkout.
At the time Gill wrote the piece, the agency he was working with had already begun developing similar AI-powered discovery tools for brands. The concept proved prescient, though the agency itself did not survive the early phase of AI adoption.
Now the retail industry appears to be catching up.
This week John Lewis said it would invest in AI-powered shopping, with the ambition of “becoming one of the first UK retailers to fully adopt and integrate the technology”. The initiative forms part of the retailer’s £800m multi-year transformation programme.
In practical terms, the investment is designed to ensure John Lewis products appear in the environments where discovery is increasingly taking place.
The retailer said its products will begin appearing on AI platforms such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT later this year, allowing shoppers who are searching for ideas or inspiration within those tools to discover John Lewis items. As the technology becomes available in the UK, customers are expected to be able to complete purchases directly within those apps.
To support this shift, John Lewis has expanded its partnership with Commercetools, which the retailer describes as an AI-first digital commerce platform. The integration is intended to enable AI-led product discovery and facilitate transactions through third-party platforms.
“Our customers are already using AI apps and discovery platforms to find products they love,” said Dom McBrien, chief digital and omnichannel officer at John Lewis. “These investments will mean that we are right there when customers are looking for ideas — and being able to quickly and easily buy in a few clicks is a game-changer.”
The retailer is also experimenting with other discovery-led commerce models.
This week John Lewis launched a 90-day pilot on TikTok Shop, timed around the Mother’s Day gifting period. The trial features a curated edit of beauty and gifting products that can be purchased directly within the platform, including a final release of the retailer’s now sold-out Mother’s Day Beauty Box featuring brands such as Jo Malone London, Augustinus Bader and Estée Lauder.
At the same time, the retailer is expanding its on-demand partnership with Uber Eats, allowing customers in delivery areas around its Stratford, Kingston, Cambridge and Liverpool stores to order from around 3,000 products across home, beauty and technology categories. Deliveries are expected within 45 minutes.
The expansion follows an initial trial with two stores last year.
Taken together, the initiatives suggest John Lewis is testing how its products can appear in the places where consumers increasingly begin their search for ideas, whether that is through generative AI tools, social platforms or rapid delivery apps.
The strategy builds on a longer shift within the retailer toward digital commerce. John Lewis launched its first online shopping website in 2001, and today digital channels account for around 60 per cent of total sales alongside its network of 36 physical stores.
What is changing now is not simply how customers complete purchases, but where discovery begins.
For brands watching closely, the John Lewis approach offers a glimpse of how retailers may start to adapt to an emerging layer of AI-driven discovery commerce, ensuring products are visible wherever consumers seek inspiration, rather than relying solely on traditional search and retail websites.
If those experiments prove successful, it could signal a broader shift in retail, one where the path from inspiration to purchase increasingly begins inside AI assistants, social platforms and on-demand apps rather than on a retailer’s own website.
.png)
