There's a familiar pattern in e-commerce that nobody likes to talk about. You launch a shiny new chatbot. The widget looks great. The dashboard shows hundreds of conversations. Your support team is a bit less overloaded. And yet, when you open your revenue report… nothing really changes. The problem isn't that chat is a bad idea. It's that most brands are still running what is essentially a glorified FAQ in a chat bubble. Meanwhile, what actually moves the needle in 2026 is something much closer to a digital sales associate: an AI agent that lives inside your store, understands what's going on, and can take action.
