The man who built Apple’s stores doesn’t buy Silicon Valley’s bet on AI shopping

Silicon Valley is pouring money into AI agents that can shop for people. Ron Johnson isn’t buying the idea that they’ll replace the store trip, especially when the purchase gets expensive and personal.

Johnson, now 66, helped build Apple’s retail business after joining the company in 2000, just as online shopping was taking off. He says AI will make online shopping better, but not rewrite the basic way people shop. The line he draws is simple: an agent can help narrow the field, but it can’t put a laptop in your hands or show you how the screen feels.

That skepticism lands right in the middle of the industry push toward what’s being called agentic commerce. Google is backing Universal Commerce Protocol, which is meant to move shoppers from discovery to checkout. OpenAI is pushing ChatGPT toward becoming a place where people can research, compare, and sometimes buy products without leaving the chatbot.

Johnson’s example is a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop. He says nobody is handing that choice over to a machine without visiting a website or a store. The better outcome, in his view, is more informed shoppers walking into a physical store after AI has done some of the sorting for them.

That belief comes straight from Apple’s retail playbook. The stores were built not just to sell Macs, but to let people try products, learn how to use them, and come back for help. Johnson says the real advantage was never the glass or the layout. It was the people, and the way they treated customers.

He’s seen the other side too. His stint running J.C. Penney ended after less than two years, and he says he moved too fast and treated a turnaround like a startup. He later founded Enjoy Technology, which went bankrupt in 2022 and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion. But on AI itself, he’s not gloomy. He calls himself an AI optimist, just not a believer in handing the keys to a machine.