Retail’s next era isn’t on the horizon, it’s already rolling out — and Asia-Pacific is setting the pace.
At NRF APAC 2025: Retail Unlimited, the region’s most advanced retailers demonstrated what full-scale, AI-powered commerce looks like: intelligent agents acting on behalf of consumers, stores functioning as media platforms, and seamless journeys that span digital and physical touch points.
But as autonomy accelerates, so does complexity. AI can now act, but can you verify who it’s acting for?
Forter and AWS were at the forefront of these conversations, highlighting how identity-first, trust-driven infrastructure is enabling this shift to scale safely.
The Agentic Shift: From Personalization to Autonomy
“From personalization to predictive to now agentic.” – Vince Koh, Head of Digital Commerce, AWS ASEAN
Retail AI has evolved in waves. The first brought personalization. The second delivered prediction. Now, retail enters its third wave: agency, where AI doesn’t just recommend — it acts.
As AWS’ Vince Koh noted, we’re approaching a reality where every consumer has a personal AI companion that shops, compares, and completes purchases across channels autonomously. Features like Amazon’s “Buy For Me” are early signals of this shift.
With this new capability comes a mirrored threat. For every legitimate AI assistant enhancing the shopping experience, another is engineered to defraud it — automating promo abuse, triggering returns, and mimicking customer behavior at scale.
While consumers are still experimenting with agentic tools, bad actors are already operational — moving faster, learning quicker, and targeting every gap in retail systems.
To deliver smarter, faster, frictionless experiences, retailers must give AI more autonomy. But that autonomy only works if you know who to trust.
Why Data Isn’t Enough, And Never Was
Retailers aren’t short on data. They’re short on identities.
At NRF APAC, Koh emphasized that AI is not a tool; it’s an ecosystem. That ecosystem depends on more than just data quality or infrastructure. At Forter, we recognize that one of the most crucial components of this ecosystem is identity. Without it, data remains fragmented, and decisions lack context and clarity.
Identity ensures a personalized offer isn’t extended to an exploitative agent. It’s what determines whether a $500 return is processed for a loyal shopper or a repeat abuser working across 50 fake accounts.
Without real-time identity recognition, autonomy becomes a vulnerability.
The Next Generation of Shoppers
Retailers often speak about “winning the next generation.” But Gen Z is not waiting to be won over. They’re shaping the industry in real time, and their expectations are rewriting the rules.
They don’t see channels; they see experiences. They don’t differentiate between shopping online, in-store, through an app, or via their AI assistant. What they want is a consistent, seamless journey that recognizes them, reflects their identity, and respects their preferences.
Loyalty, for this generation, isn’t a program. It’s seamless recognition. That recognition must extend beyond the human customer to the intelligent agents that will increasingly act on their behalf. If a retailer’s systems can’t distinguish between a customer’s AI assistant and a bot designed to abuse a promo code, then the trust battle is lost.
The Retail Trust Layer: Why Identity Comes First
Retailers are scaling AI to personalize experiences, streamline operations, and meet increasingly high expectations. However, there’s a foundational layer missing in most of these architectures: trust.
Trust doesn’t live in a feature. It lives in the foundation of a brand.
Fraudsters have already industrialized their tech stacks. Retailers need to do the same with defenses that operate at agentic speed. That means replacing outdated, rules-based fraud systems with something adaptive, intelligent, and architectural.
Forter’s Trust Platform does just that: delivering real-time identity intelligence across the entire customer journey. It empowers automation, protects revenue, and distinguishes between trusted shoppers and coordinated abuse rings, even when both look identical on the surface.
Together with AWS, Forter is helping global retailers embed The Forter Trust Platform across their commerce stacks, bridging the gap between innovation, customer experience, and revenue growth.
Trust Is the Competitive Advantage
NRF APAC didn’t just reveal new tools — it signaled a new mindset.
In a world of agentic AI, trust is your competitive edge. It accelerates adoption, increases conversion, and powers customer retention. It doesn’t slow AI down — it ensures AI works.
As commerce becomes increasingly autonomous, trust becomes the key to scaling it safely and securely. And identity becomes the foundation of that trust.
