AI can do the shopping. Who gets the therapy?

There’s something we may be about to lose, and nobody seems to be talking about it: the joy of shopping. Before e-commerce, you went to the high street, the mall or the market. You wandered, browsed, touched things, tried things on and found things you weren’t looking for. You might not buy anything, but somehow you felt better.

Amazon and e-commerce took away much of the physical experience but left us the hunt. Hundreds of products, price comparisons, reviews, fifteen open tabs and the comforting belief that you were “researching” rather than window shopping. A little retail therapy survived.

Now AI is threatening even that. Ask it what to buy and it will research the options, compare them and recommend one. Google is already experimenting with agentic checkout that buys on your behalf, and ChatGPT is moving from product discovery towards agentic commerce. Soon the whole thing could be: “I need new running shoes.” “These are the ones.” “Buy them.” Done. No browsing, no comparing, no rabbit holes, no accidentally coming home with a lamp.

Wonderfully convenient. But convenience isn’t always the point. We don’t watch Netflix because it’s the most efficient way to consume television, or go to restaurants because cooking is inefficient. Perhaps we don’t shop purely because we need things. Sometimes the journey is the product.

So if AI removes the journey, what replaces it? Maybe the next kind of retail therapy isn’t finding what you need but discovering something you didn’t know you wanted. AI as less of a personal shopper and more of a personal curator: not “here’s the best option” but “here’s something you might love.”

That distinction matters a great deal for brands. If AI becomes the gatekeeper between people and products, brands won’t just compete for attention; they’ll compete for recommendation. The job won’t only be getting someone to see your product. It will be convincing the AI your product is worth showing them.

So retail therapy may not be dying. It may simply be moving from the shop window to the algorithm. Whether that’s exciting or slightly terrifying, I haven’t decided. I’ll ask the AI. It’ll probably recommend something.