Apple Store Builder Ron Johnson Pushes Back on Silicon Valley's AI Shopping Bet

Johnson, 66, has heard predictions about the demise of physical retail before. He joined Apple in 2000 to build its retail business as online shopping was beginning to take off, and went on to help create a store network that became central to how Apple sells its products and connects with customers.

"AI is a new technology that will improve the online shopping experience," Johnson said in an interview with TechCrunch. "But I don't know that it's going to change which way we shop."

His comments come as major technology companies push AI deeper into commerce, a concept commonly called agentic commerce. Google is advancing its Universal Commerce Protocol, a standard designed to help AI agents take consumers from product discovery to checkout. OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into a shopping destination where users can research, compare and, in some cases, buy products without leaving the chatbot.

Asked whether he could imagine someone letting an agent choose and buy a $1,000 or $2,000 laptop without ever visiting a website or a store, Johnson was unequivocal: "Honestly, nobody's going to do that." Buying a laptop is too personal a purchase to delegate to an agent, he argued. Buyers want to feel its weight, see the display and decide which size works for them, he said, adding that AI may narrow the choices but many consumers will still want to experience a product themselves before spending that kind of money. "AI will never be able to have you physically experience a product," Johnson said. He expects agents instead to produce better-informed shoppers. "They'll just become more informed shoppers when they come to the store."

Johnson traces that conviction to a decision Apple made more than two decades ago. The company's stores, he said, were designed not only as places to buy Macs but as places where people could try products, learn how to use them and return for help when something went wrong. He revisits the strategy in a new book, "Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius," about building Apple's retail operations alongside Steve Jobs. Competitors borrowed Apple's glass-heavy design, open layouts and even versions of the Genius Bar, he said, but often missed the people. "The secret sauce for Apple has always been its people, the people in the store, and how they treat the customer," Johnson said. Apple Store employees are not paid on commission, he noted, unlike the sales culture common across much of retail; the aim was to remove the pressure to sell and have employees work out what a customer actually needed.

After leaving Apple, Johnson took over J.C. Penney in 2011 with an ambitious plan to reinvent the struggling department-store chain. He was ousted less than two years later after sales plunged. He now says he tried to change too much, too quickly, without bringing employees and customers along. Apple's stores had effectively been a startup that evolved alongside the company's products, whereas J.C. Penney required a turnaround. "I applied a startup mentality to what needed to be a turnaround transformation," he recalled. He later founded Enjoy Technology, an e-commerce company that brought technology products and setup services into customers' homes; it filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and sold substantially all of its assets to Asurion.

For all his skepticism about how AI will reshape shopping, Johnson remains bullish on the technology itself. "I'm a real believer in AI. I'm an AI optimist," he said. He believes Jobs would have embraced AI too, but not as a substitute for human judgment. "There's no substitute for human intuition," Johnson said, recalling Jobs' belief in bringing smart people together to debate problems and find new ways of looking at them.