Ron Johnson, the retail executive who joined Apple in 2000 to build its store network, is pushing back on Silicon Valley’s bet that AI agents will take over shopping. In a TechCrunch interview, he said AI will improve the online shopping experience but will not change which way people shop. Asked whether anyone would let an agent choose and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without visiting a website or store, Johnson was direct: “Honestly, nobody’s going to do that.” His reasoning is that laptop purchases are too personal; buyers want to feel the weight, see the display, and decide on size. AI can narrow choices, he said, but it can never give someone a physical product experience. He expects the bigger effect to be better-informed shoppers arriving at stores, not shoppers replaced by machines.

The article contrasts Johnson’s position with major AI commerce pushes: Google is promoting Universal Commerce Protocol, a standard to move AI agents from product discovery to checkout, and OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into a shopping destination where users can research, compare, and in some cases buy without leaving the chatbot. Johnson’s conviction is grounded in the model he helped create at Apple, which he describes in his new book Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius. Apple stores were designed as places to try products, learn how to use them, and get help later. He argues competitors copied Apple’s glass-heavy design and Genius Bar but missed the real differentiator: store employees who are not paid on commission and are focused on figuring out what a customer actually needs. “The secret sauce for Apple has always been its people,” Johnson said.

The interview also revisits Johnson’s later failures. He took over J.C. Penney in 2011 with an aggressive reinvention plan and was ousted in less than two years after sales plunged. He now says he applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation. His later startup Enjoy Technology, which delivered tech products and setup services to homes, filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and sold its assets to Asurion. Despite his skepticism about agentic commerce, Johnson remains optimistic about AI itself and believes Steve Jobs would have embraced it, but not as a substitute for human judgment. “There’s no substitute for human intuition,” he said.