New research from the Northwestern Retail Analytics Council and MINTY examines how AI-assisted shopping is changing commerce and how prepared brands and retailers are for the shift.
September 25, 2026
By Frank Dudley, Professor and Associate Director, Retail Analytics Council, and Frank Mulhern, Ph.D., Professor, former Associate Dean and Director, Retail Analytics Council. The Retail Analytics Council is part of the Medill Spiegel Research Center at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.
Executive summary
New research from the Northwestern Retail Analytics Council and MINTY examines the emerging world of proactive commerce. The shopper’s side of the transaction is automated. The seller’s side is not. AI now comparison-shops on the consumer’s behalf, while many commerce organizations are still catching up. Read what 150 commerce leaders see coming and how far their operations are from it in The New World of Proactive Commerce.
Something changed in how Americans shop, and it changed quickly. Three years of price increases sent consumers looking for value with more determination than at any point in a decade. Then they were handed a tool that made the looking almost free. An AI assistant will now compare every seller, surface every promotion, check whether a discount is genuinely a discount, and do it in seconds, on every purchase, at no cost in effort. Value-seeking used to be limited by how much time a shopper was willing to spend. That limit is gone.
This is the condition the study calls proactive commerce. On the consumer’s side of the transaction, the work of comparison is automated, continuous and always running. On the seller’s side, most commerce organizations still operate the way they always have: wait for a demand signal, then respond. That model is too slow when the shopper’s assistant has already compared you against eleven alternatives and moved on. Operating proactively means anticipating that comparison rather than reacting to its outcome: knowing what the shopper is actually optimizing for, making your full value legible before anyone asks for it, and funding the channels that help consumers save as acquisition infrastructure rather than as promotional expense.
The Proactive Commerce Leadership Index measures how far commerce organizations have traveled from the first model toward the second. Wave 1 was fielded in August 2026 among 150 senior decision-makers at consumer brands, retailers and marketplaces, 98% of them at organizations above $100M in annual revenue. This is the first wave, which determines what the report can and cannot claim. It is a baseline, not a trend: it establishes the instrument, the population and the control values that every subsequent wave will be measured against. No figure in this report describes movement over time.
Each respondent is scored 0 to 100 across five weighted dimensions built from fifteen questions, and those scores fall into five fixed tiers running from Laggard to Leader. The Wave 1 field average is 65, which sits in the upper half of the Transitional band of 55 to 69: the typical organization is past reactive basics and short of proactive operations. More than a third of the field, 38%, already scores 70 or above and qualifies as Adopter or Leader, while only 16% sit at Reactive or below. This is a market clustered in the middle rather than split between the advanced and the absent, and the proactive playbook is plainly executable, and a meaningful minority is already executing it with tools available today. The next section sets out the scale in full.
The dimension scores are where the study turns. Consumer AI Readiness, which measures how accurately leaders read the shift in shopper behavior, scores 74 and is the highest of the five. Proactive Commerce Adoption and Savings Ecosystem Maturity, which measure what those same organizations actually do, both score 59. Commerce leaders have diagnosed this market correctly and are operating fifteen points behind their own diagnosis. Nothing in the data suggests they are confused about where it is going. The distance is between seeing and building, which makes it an operations problem rather than an insight problem, and therefore a solvable one.
Three consequences run through the rest of this paper. The consumer thesis is settled: 85% of leaders report that consumer focus on maximizing value rose over the past year and only 6% report any decline, while the fastest-growing AI shopping behaviors are, without exception, value behaviors. The savings ecosystem (cashback, rewards and verified deals) is being re-rated in real time from a loyalty tactic into acquisition infrastructure, with strategic framing rising from 16% today to 41% by 2027. And the definition of the customer is changing inside a single planning cycle: 79% expect their primary customer to involve AI by the end of 2027, while 44% concede they are not well prepared to sell to one.
Read the full report in The New World of Proactive Commerce.
Hear more about the findings from The New World of Proactive Commerce and what they mean for brands and retailers in a conversation with eMarketer and MINTY.