Shaping Sustainable Consumer Choices Through Agentic Commerce in the Grocery Retail Sector

Sammanfattning

As grocery retail enters agentic commerce, consumer decisions may increasingly bedelegated to AI agents that search, compare, recommend, and assemble shopping carts onbehalf of users. Yet, little is known about how sustainable choices are shaped when groceryshopping becomes a human-AI interaction rather than an individual consumer decision.Building on practice theory, customer journey theory, and choice architecture, this studyanalyses sustainable choice-making through a qualitative case study of the ChatGPT-Instacartintegration in the US grocery retail sector. Drawing on observations, interviews, netnographicmaterial, and an expert interview, we examine how participants interacted with an AI agentacross pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages. We find that agentic groceryshopping is shaped through the co-creation of meanings, competences, and materialities:participants bring existing shopping priorities into the interaction, the agent redistributescompetences by taking over planning, search, comparison, and cart-building, and theinterface structures what can be noticed, selected, corrected, or overlooked. We identifysustainability-related frictions across the journey, including trade-off, information,availability, effort, and outcome frictions. By showing how sustainability can be recognisedin the conversational layer but weakened in the transition to product selection and checkout,the study contributes to research on sustainable consumption, AI-mediated customerjourneys, and agentic commerce, while offering implications for retailers, platformdevelopers, and policymakers seeking to make sustainable choices visible, actionable, anddurable in agentic commerce.