Silicon Valley is pouring billions into AI agents designed to shop on our behalf, but the man who built Apple's retail empire from scratch believes the industry has an inflated sense of how much shopping consumers will actually delegate to machines. He's confident physical stores will keep thriving.

Ron Johnson, 66, has lived through predictions of physical retail's death before. He came to Apple in 2000 to construct its retail operation just as online shopping was gaining momentum, and he helped build a store network that 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."

His perspective arrives at a moment when the world's largest tech companies are racing to embed AI deeper into shopping, wagering that agents can automate more of how we discover and purchase goods — an idea widely known as agentic commerce. Google is advancing this vision through its Universal Commerce Protocol, a standard meant to guide AI agents from product discovery all the way through checkout. OpenAI, for its part, is transforming ChatGPT into a shopping hub where users can research, compare, and sometimes even purchase products without ever leaving the chatbot.

When asked whether he could picture someone allowing an agent to pick out and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without ever visiting a website or store, Johnson didn't hesitate: "Honestly, nobody's going to do that."

Purchasing a laptop, he contended, is too personal a decision to hand off to an AI agent. Buyers want to feel its weight, see the display, and determine which size suits them. He noted that many consumers would still want to experience a product firsthand before spending that kind of money.

"AI will never be able to have you physically experience a product," Johnson said. Rather, he envisions agents helping consumers arrive at stores better prepared. "They'll just become more informed shoppers when they come to the store."

Johnson's confidence traces back to a choice Apple made over twenty years ago. Apple's physical stores, he explained, were conceived not just as places to purchase Macs, but as spaces where people could test products, learn to use them, and come back for assistance when problems arose.

Some of those early gambles 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 observed, copied Apple's glass-heavy aesthetic, open floor plans, and even versions of the Genius Bar — but frequently overlooked 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 aren't compensated on commission, Johnson pointed out, in contrast to the sales culture prevalent across much of retail. The philosophy, he said, was to eliminate the pressure to sell and instead let employees determine what a customer genuinely needed.

After departing Apple, Johnson took the helm at J. C. Penney in 2011 with a bold plan to reinvent the struggling department-store chain. He was forced out less than two years later after sales collapsed. Johnson now acknowledges he attempted to change too much, too fast, without carrying employees and customers along for the journey. Apple's stores had essentially been a startup that grew in tandem with the company's products. J. C. Penney, by contrast, was a turnaround that demanded a different playbook.

"I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation," he recalled.

Johnson eventually returned to the startup world, founding Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company that delivered technology products and setup services straight to customers' homes. The startup filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion.

Despite his doubts about how AI will reshape shopping, Johnson remains enthusiastic about the technology itself. "I'm a real believer in AI. I'm an AI optimist," he said. He thinks Jobs would have welcomed AI as well — but not as a replacement for human judgment.

"There's no substitute for human intuition," Johnson said, recalling Jobs' conviction in assembling smart people to debate problems and uncover new ways of examining them.