When AI Does the Shopping, Who Wins the Loyalty? | 5IM

Foreigning us now for five insightful minutes is Seb Hill, Chief Marketing officer at TCC Global, a global loyalty company.

Recorded live on the show floor here at Grocery Shop 2026.

SEB is here to share some brand new research the TTC has published on the grocery sector.

Look, first question, SEB, retailers have had to adapt to enormous disruption in recent years.

What do you see as the next big challenge they need to prepare for?

So good to be here, Ben.

Price is going to be a huge thing, goes without saying.

But what we're really interested in is the impact of agentic AI.

So we're exploring the impact it will have on the grocery sector and our view being it's going to be significant.

If AI did start making more of the shopping decisions.

What breaks in the traditional grocery model,.

You know, broadly, grocery has been pretty well insulated from, you know, the previous sort of digital transformations and revolutions.

Right.

I think AgentIQ has the opportunity to disrupt grocery in some pretty specific ways and actually earlier than other sectors.

You know, one as an example, impulse is going to be hugely affected if it disrupts store traffic.

If it starts taking decision making out of the shopping process or impulse led decision making, impulse starts to collapse.

Retail media, I imagine having sort of blown up so much is going to be hugely disrupted because you know, all of a sudden the shopper is starting to think in terms of, you know, purely mission.

They're not necessarily naming particular products or brands, they're not even open and receptive to, to those promotions from, from the brands and from the retailer.

The agent is in the way and I think finally is the impact on brand.

Right.

You know, will shoppers in an agentic world think about CPG brands?

I would imagine much less.

So will they think about retail brand?

Almost definitely a lot less so interesting.

So one of the things we've seen retailers heavily investing in these loyalty programs, apps, personalized offers.

What happens to that model if AI agents start making more of the shopping decisions?

So broadly speaking, the challenge that that part of the loyalty industry faces is they don't necessarily drive what we think of as shopper loyalty.

So they're great for a number of reasons.

You know, they, they harvest a lot of data on the shopper, they become the, the gateway, the vehicle for that retail media play.

What they don't do is generate any actual loyalty.

So in the US the average shopper has, I think it's 15 loyalty cards for different stores.

So you know, in a nutshell, shoppers aren't very loyal regardless of the number of cards they have.

When you enter an agentic world, the emotional aspect of loyalty starts to matter a huge amount.

Because again, going back to that point around mission as a shopper, I'm saying to my agent, look, I want to make a healthy dinner, you know, tonight I want to replenish the stuff for my kids lunch boxes for the week.

What I'm not necessarily saying is, and I want you to fulfill all of my basket with this particular merchant because, you know, I'm getting some points as an example.

Okay, interesting.

So in which case then, how do you know if a shopper is genuinely loyal?

So if traditional program metrics don't necessarily tell you whether a shopper is genuinely loyal, how can retailers understand the strength of their relationships?

I think the question is how do you combine that transactional loyalty, that hard loyalty metric around trips, around frequency, etcetera, with the emotional side of loyalty, you know, the head, which is, you know, how loyal, loyal does the shopper feel towards me?

Have I given them a compelling reason to come back and choose me versus going across the street to that competitor?

How insulated am I from a purely price led equation?

And I think it's the combination of those two things, the hard loyalty, the soft loyalty, emotional, transactional, that retailers really need to lean into.

Okay, so which is probably the big question then.

If AI will potentially optimize things like price and convenience, how does the whole concept of grocery loyalty itself need to evolve?

Yeah, absolutely.

So we've just put out a paper on the age of agentic AI and it explores these two particular questions.

So what happens uniquely in a grocery environment and what is the role of loyalty?

So it sets out two 18 month tracks.

The first one is all around how you get AgentIQ ready.

You know, let's think of this in terms of hard loyalty metrics.

All of a sudden the agent has inserted itself between the shopper, the consumer and you as the merchant, especially as the retailer.

So how does that impact your technology, your pricing, your ability to welcome agentic bots into your digital environments, except, etc.

All big questions and lots of cool research in there for people to explore.

And then I think, you know, really interestingly, this is an opportunity and it's the second track to bake loyalty and loyalty thinking in at a foundational level.

So how do grocers get shoppers to start thinking in some of those ways?

Maybe we would think about 20 years ago, the importance of brand becomes really important.

The importance of emotional preference and the role of, I think real tangible rewards that give a shopper a reason to also have retailer and retail brand as part of their decision making criteria.

Okay, so Seb, if people want to know more, if they want to read the research, how could they contact you?

Yeah.

Head over to tccglobal.com, you'll see a link where you can sign up and get a copy of that report and get in touch.

We'd love to talk to you about agentic shopping, about loyalty, and about the future of the grocery industry.

Thank you for joining us, Sebastian.