Ulta Agentic AI Case Study: Winning in the Agentic Era
Ulta’s practical roadmap for commerce when AI agents start making decisions
By Carsten Krause
January 27, 2026
NRF 2026 didn’t just feature another AI panel. It surfaced a strategic truth retailers can’t ignore: agentic commerce is not a concept anymore — it’s a distribution shift. The winning question is no longer “How do we optimize conversion?” It’s “How do we get chosen when the buyer isn’t human?”
In the NRF session “Winning in the Agentic Era: Ulta’s Take on the Commerce Roadmap to Success”, Josh Friedman (SVP Digital & E-Commerce, Ulta Beauty) and Anne-Claire Baschet (Chief Data & AI Officer, Mirakl) laid out what matters when Gemini, ChatGPT, and Alexa-class agents become primary shopping interfaces.
On stage:
- Josh Friedman, SVP of Digital & E-Commerce, Ulta Beauty
- Anne-Claire Baschet, Chief Data & AI Officer, Mirakl
- Moderated by Adrien Nussbaum, Co-CEO, Mirakl
This was not futurism. It was an operator-level discussion about visibility, trust, data, and operational performance — the real determinants of whether an agent includes your offer in the shortlist.
Market reality: the agentic prize is massive — and it moves faster than prior waves
McKinsey’s published view is blunt: by 2030, agentic commerce could orchestrate up to $1T in U.S. B2C retail revenue and $3T–$5T globally.
That’s not incremental growth. That’s a re-routing of value flow — where discovery, comparison, and eventually checkout are mediated by agents.
At the same time, consumer behavior has already started shifting. Adobe reported that in a survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers, 38% had used generative AI for online shopping, and 52% planned to use it that year (2025).
And in January 2026, Adobe Digital Insights reported rising trust: among consumers using AI for online shopping, 65% said they felt more confident in their purchase, and 68% said they were less likely to return the product after using AI.
Bottom line: agents aren’t “coming.” They’re already shaping evaluation and intent, and the economics are too large for retailers to sit on the sidelines.
The most important quote of the session: it’s not an AI revolution
Baschet reframed the entire discussion in one line:
“It’s really a revolution… but that is really a shopper revolution.”
She explained why this matters: shoppers don’t think in keywords anymore — they think in problems, context, and constraints:
“My washing machine is broken… I want to have something that is delivered Saturday morning. That’s typically my problem, and it’s more than two to three keywords.”
This is the shift from search terms to delegated intent. Retailers that still optimize for the old model will look “fine” in their own analytics while becoming invisible in the channels that are quietly taking over the top of the funnel.
Ulta’s strategic advantage: curated breadth + content depth
Ulta’s marketplace strategy is a case study in how to expand assortment without sacrificing brand integrity. Friedman described Ulta’s marketplace as invite-only and intentionally curated:
“We’re invite only… we want to be super curated and that’s really served us well.”
He shared the execution result:
“We launched in September… internal goal to get a hundred brands up and we’re now at 150.”
This matters in agentic commerce for a simple reason: assortment breadth increases the probability you match intent, and content depth increases the probability you get selected.
Friedman explicitly connected the marketplace to the agentic era:
“Now having all the content that comes with it… is going to really serve us well… with agentic commerce and whatever’s coming next week.”
That last phrase is the most honest roadmap statement you’ll hear all year. In agentic commerce, the winners won’t be the ones with the prettiest 36-month plan. They’ll be the ones built to bob and weave.
“The risk is invisibility”: the new first-order problem
Baschet delivered the line every retail exec should print and tape to their monitor:
“I think today the main risk is the risk of invisibility.”
Agentic channels don’t browse like humans. They parse, rank, and decide based on what they can interpret. Her prescription was direct:
“The first thing… is your data product content… make it richer to match this intent of the user.”
Friedman echoed it with executive clarity:
“Structured product content is gold.”
He also described a concrete investment:
“One of the investments we made last year was to actually use AI to structure product content.”
This is the new baseline: structured product data + unstructured proof (UGC, editorial, community) that gives agents enough signals to trust the offer.
Agentic ranking isn’t SEO. It’s operations.
Baschet made a point that most organizations are underestimating: agentic commerce protocols don’t just need product feeds — they need the truth of your operation:
“You are providing… the reality of your operation. You say, this is the estimated delivery date. Are you delivering… on the delivery date that was promised?”
This is where it gets ruthless:
“Agents don’t care… they will just show up the best price… if you are out of stock for three days, you will disappear.”
In the agentic era, marketing doesn’t “win” if operations can’t deliver. Your brand doesn’t “win” if availability isn’t consistent. The system rewards predictable execution.
Loyalty becomes an agent trust signal — not just a retention tool
One of the highest-value strategic insights of the session was Friedman’s view of loyalty in an agent-mediated world:
“We think that the agents will know that the guests… have shopped with Ulta… that they’re part of our loyalty program and we have a beauty profile on them… and they’ll trust that.”
That’s a major shift. Loyalty stops being primarily a marketing construct and becomes a machine-readable trust layer. But Friedman was equally clear about permission and boundaries:
“We absolutely will want to get permission from our guests… There’s no way we will share it.”
So the competitive question becomes: how do you make loyalty and identity useful to agents without violating trust? Ulta’s direction is explicit: permissioned utility, not indiscriminate sharing.
The “agent roadmap” reality: nobody has it finished — winners build adaptability
When asked whether Ulta has an agent roadmap, Friedman gave the most credible answer possible:
“It’s in progress. If anybody tells you they have a mature roadmap… take a peek at LinkedIn.”
Baschet reinforced what this means organizationally:
“First I would set up a clear ownership internally… Who is the clear owner of this agentic strategy?”
And she laid out the sequencing executives should copy:
“Data product content before putting a product sellable… because putting products sellable if you are invisible will not make you… grow your business.”
This is a mature play: foundations first, then monetization.
The CDO TIMES Bottom Line
Agentic commerce is not a feature. It is a new competitive surface where machines decide who gets seen, trusted, and bought. McKinsey’s projection of up to $1T in U.S. orchestrated retail revenue by 2030 isn’t a forecast to admire — it’s a warning shot. Retailers that treat this like “another channel” will discover the channel doesn’t need them. It needs their data and their operational truth.
Ulta’s pragmatic roadmap is worth copying because it’s not dependent on guessing the future. It’s built on controllable advantages: curated assortment expansion, content depth, structured product data, and loyalty as a permissioned trust signal. The real strategic pivot is that ranking becomes operational: delivery promises, stock posture, and price competitiveness become machine-visible and machine-scored. As Baschet put it, the biggest risk is invisibility — and agents don’t care about your brand story if your execution fails.
Executive next steps (do these in 2026):
- Assign a single owner for agentic commerce (not a committee).
- Treat product content as a strategic asset: structured attributes, enriched intent coverage, and unstructured proof (UGC/editorial).
- Instrument operational truth for agents: availability accuracy, delivery reliability, and returns performance as measurable signals.
- Modernize loyalty into permissioned agent utility: identity, preferences, and benefits that agents can safely use to choose you.
- Build adaptability, not a “perfect roadmap”: protocols will change — fundamentals (content + connectivity + execution) will not.
Sources in this article:
NRF (2026) https://nrfbigshow.nrf.com/session/3389
McKinsey (2025). Quantumblack. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-agentic-commerce-opportunity-how-ai-agents-are-ushering-in-a-new-era-for-consumers-and-merchants
Adobe (2025). https://business.adobe.com/blog/generative-ai-powered-shopping-rises-with-traffic-to-retail-sites
https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-driven-traffic-surges-across-industries
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