Retailers risk losing customers as AI shopping agents arrive

Retailers are unprepared for the imminent arrival of AI-powered shopping agents, with some major retail sites inadvertently blocking the customers they’re trying to serve, a study has found.

The State of Browser Agents in Australian Retail report by AI specialist Time Under Tension tested 11 major Australian retailers including JB Hi-Fi, Bunnings, Chemist Warehouse and Officeworks.

“The AI waves currently lapping at retailers' shores will become a tidal wave in 2026, when Google launches browser agents in Chrome and this technology has the capacity to reach 3.5 billion users worldwide,” said Tim O'Neill, co-founder of Time Under Tension.

“Retailers who are not prepared risk losing significant market share to competitors who've optimised their sites for this new reality.”

The study tested three newly launched browser agents - OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and Microsoft Edge with Copilot - across a range of common shopping tasks, finding significant disparities in how retail sites perform when navigated by AI rather than humans.

JB Hi-Fi, Bing Lee, Priceline and Bunnings emerged as standout performers, with clean site structures and minimal friction enabling agents to complete tasks quickly and accurately.

JB Hi-Fi topped the leaderboard with Agents completing tasks in less than 2.2 minutes and secured product selection with 97 per cent accuracy, while some other retailers struggled with bot verification systems that blocked legitimate shopping attempts.

“The single biggest barrier we discovered was bot verification,” said O'Neill.

“Nearly half of all test runs hit some form of human verification challenge. The irony is that retailers are blocking their future customers while trying to prevent malicious bots.”

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