Tapestry Deploys Agentic AI to Guide Shoppers

According to WWD, Tapestry, Inc., the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade New York, is deploying agentic AI to assist shoppers by narrowing selections and surfacing relevant options. WWD reports Mandeep Bhatia, senior vice president of Global Digital Product and Omnichannel Innovation at Tapestry, saying, "That world is not here yet," in reference to fully autonomous bots making purchases for consumers. WWD also quotes Tamara Pircz, vice president of e-commerce at Kate Spade, describing how agentic AI can read signals from how a customer navigates a site to help identify what they want, while stopping short of buying items on the customer's behalf. WWD reports a recent survey of 500 U.S. consumers finding 5 percent would let agentic AI make purchases for them. The article says Tapestry's use of AI frequently narrows choices in ways that still drive customers to visit physical stores.

Agentic AI in retail, as reported by WWD, typically layers user intent inference on top of personalization and recommendation systems. Industry practitioners implementing similar flows combine session behavior signals, preference elicitation, and contextual filters to reduce candidate sets before a human finalizes a choice. For enterprises, that pattern often prioritizes precision over automation for high-consideration purchases, because the cost of a mistaken automated purchase is materially higher than in commodity retail.

Retail reporting frames Tapestry's approach within a broader pattern where brands use AI to augment pre-purchase discovery while preserving human touchpoints for emotionally significant buys. Observed patterns in comparable deployments show AI narrowing can increase conversion efficiency and in-store traffic, but consumer trust remains a gating factor for handing over transactional authority to autonomous agents.

Indicators to follow include uptake metrics for agentic features (click-to-store, assisted-send-to-cart), changes in conversion rates for AI-narrowed sessions versus baseline, and follow-up consumer sentiment or trust studies that quantify willingness to let agents transact. Also watch whether other luxury retailers report similar mixes of digital narrowing plus in-store closure, which would signal a broader operational model for high-consideration retail.