Is the shopping list about to be consigned to the dustbin of history? Yes it is. Not because people will stop buying things, but because they may no longer need to decide which things to buy, says German Faraoni Heidenreich, global director, data & shared services at Reckitt, ahead of his panel at CustomerX.

Consider the familiar chaos of preparing for a busy weekend. The house needs cleaning, the fridge needs stocking and the children need taking to sports practice – or in my case this weekend, university. Today, that means remembering what is required, searching for products, comparing prices, choosing retailers and arranging collection or delivery. 

But, by the time my next child heads to uni in two years’ time, I may simply tell an AI agent what the weekend involves and ask it to sort it all out. I for one am keen. 

This is a far more profound change than merely using AI to make the existing shopping journey faster. It potentially replaces much of that journey with something based not on products, brands or retailers, but on outcomes.

German Faraoni Heidenreich, Global Director, data & shared services at Reckitt and a speaker at the forthcoming CustomerX event, believes this shift is already starting to reshape how consumer goods companies think about commerce.

“People in the past would say, ‘I know I have to go and clean. I have to go and check if this type of retailer of my choice will have more or less the brand that I heard about, or a friend told me about, or my parents have been using,’” he says.

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