AI agents will become even more willing than humans to abandon online purchases if the checkout experience is poor, one of Visa’s most senior leaders has warned.

Speaking at the Online Retailer conference in Sydney, Anthony Jones, the card giant’s VP of consumer solutions, said the technology would evolve to become more “discerning” and expect high levels of service as standard.

“If it can’t complete the checkout in place with one merchant, it will simply move to another one,” he said.

Jones was speaking on a panel examining the future of retail and digital commerce in 2030. He was joined on stage by local industry heavyweights including Oz Hair & Beauty’s COO Guy Nappa and Paula Mitchell, the GM of digital at Freedom Furniture.

The Online Retailer Conference & Exhibition is an annual industry event focused on e-commerce and digital retail. Held this year at Sydney’s International Convention Centre on Wednesday and Thursday, it brought together retailers, brands and technology companies for keynote presentations and panel discussions.

Jones opened his session by arguing that Visa has observed consumers in 2026 becoming even pickier, as performance levels across the industry have risen.

“Customers are expecting an even higher level of output from their retailers,” he said. “They’re expecting great online experiences. They’re expecting quick delivery, free returns, and consequently, any poor retail experiences are quickly exposed.

“Consumers will quite quickly and easily choose their preferred partner and move across to a different merchant if you’re not providing that. And as we lean into what agentic commerce starts to look like for 2030, that becomes even more relevant because an agent will become even more discerning.”

Oz Hair & Beauty’s Guy Nappa, meanwhile, pointed out that smaller online retailers often have an advantage in adapting to changing trends because they are not burdened by legacy systems that struggle to keep pace with modern commerce.

“Some businesses, especially older businesses, have got structures in place that handicap them from being fast or quick,” he said.

He argued that even relatively simple changes can become expensive, high-risk projects for established retailers because of the complexity of their existing technology.

That creates an opportunity for newer businesses to build with modern systems from the outset.

“It’s a really good time to be a new business because you can be fast, lean, and agile,” Nappa said. “Those three words are what separate great businesses from average businesses.”

Finally, Freedom’s Mitchell said that the switch to embracing AI will mirror the move retailers made a decade ago to optimise the purchasing experience for mobile users.

“We all had to work out how we made things that were on screens this big fit on screens this big, and we all sh*t ourselves and went, ‘How are we going to do that?’” she quipped. “But we did it, and now we don’t even talk about it because it’s just an expectation.”

Mitchell said AI would follow the same path. Retailers should invest in customer-facing personalisation and back-end logistics optimisation, but those technologies should remain largely invisible to shoppers.

Customers ultimately care about finding products quickly and receiving them efficiently, rather than the technology powering the experience, she said.

“You used an algorithm to deliver it cheap and fast to them, which is all excellent,” she said. “But if that delivery driver comes down the driveway and smashes their letterbox, then they hate you for life! So it’s all about the customer experience and how we just make sure we put that at the front of everything we do, no matter where we go with technology.”

Following the panel was a separate keynote session examining the rise of AI by global ethicist Dr Catriona Wallace. She urged businesses to stop thinking of the technology as just another tool, insisting it will reshape humanity’s relationship with intelligence itself.

“This is a living intelligence that now has, across the board, a superior intelligence to humans,” Wallace told delegates.

She warned businesses against dismissing the possibility that AI could become self-aware.

“We cannot afford now to not believe AI is either conscious now or will become conscious,” she said, pointing to growing research into machine consciousness.

The implications were so significant that AI should potentially be viewed as the world’s first non-biological species.

“If we did that, what would that mean?” she said.

Businesses and governments, she continued, would soon have to grapple with questions about how autonomous systems should be treated, regulated and even taxed as they increasingly take on human work.

“Within the next five years, we’ll have a lot of agentic AI,” she said. Robots would be “doing our chores at home, walking our dogs, doing our work for us”, raising questions about “what rights do they have” and “how are we going to tax the robots?”

Wallace also challenged the widespread belief that humans would always remain at the centre of AI-driven decisions.

“It’s not always going to be human. We are going to move into commerce where it is agent to agent, it’s machine to machine, and we’re not very far away from that.”

Despite AI’s rapid progress, Wallace said leadership had failed to keep pace.

“I don’t think we’re seeing good leaders in the tech giants. I don’t even think we’ve seen good leaders in government around AI,” she said, urging organisations to put ethical and responsible AI at the heart of their strategies.