November 25, 2025
The Interface That Speaks
Every evolution starts quietly: a new habit, a new expectation.
One day, we stopped clicking and started touching. Now, we are about to stop touching and start talking.
The web gave brands their first digital voice, a virtual shop window that allowed brands to express who they are, what they believe in and what they do for consumers. Mobile apps turned that voice into ca onstant presence, reshaping how we browse, shop, travel, and connect. For more than a decade, touch defined the customer journey. It influenced how we designed experiences, measured success, and built relationships.
Yet the gesture that once symbolised progress is starting to feel like the past. As technology grows more intelligent, touch has become a limit rather than a bridge — a language too small for what customers now expect.
We are entering an era where technology no longer waits to be used. It listens, understands, and speaks back.
The next interface will not live on screens. It will live in conversation.
“Early agentic adopters are seeing 12–20% higher conversions and multi-billion-dollar growth potential.”
This transformation is not theoretical. It is happening across every layer of customer experience.
People now expect to converse, not navigate, whether through a global AI assistant or within a brand’s own ecosystem powered by the same intelligence.
The most forward-thinking organisations are already building for this reality.
- Walmart has begun enabling conversational shopping through OpenAI’s new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), allowing customers to complete purchases directly within ChatGPT.
- Etsy and Shopify merchants such as Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori are among the first to participate in ACP’s “Instant Checkout,” where an AI agent can complete a transaction without leaving the dialogue.
- Booking.com now uses generative AI to plan trips and manage customer interactions across chat and voice.
- Salesforce, though not a retailer, has aligned its commerce APIs with ACP and MCP standards, giving enterprises a bridge between internal data and agent-driven transactions.
At the same time, Klarna and Expedia continue to evolve conversational commerce through their own proprietary systems built on OpenAI’s model context layer.
These early adopters are already seeing tangible results. Reuters reported that Etsy sellers participating in ACP pilots experienced up to a 15% increase in completed checkouts due to reduced friction. VentureBeat noted that Shopify brands testing conversational commerce flows recorded conversion uplifts between 12% and 20% in limited trials. And Forbes highlighted Walmart’s investment in agent-enabled retail as part of a broader strategy projected to drive $30 billion in incremental digital sales over the next five years.
The message is clear. The last decade belonged to those who mastered apps. The next will belong to those who master dialogue and the infrastructure that enables it.
From Interface to Infrastructure
Conversational systems require more than clever dialogue. They depend on architecture that can keep pace with human language, infrastructure that listens, recalls, and reacts in real time.
Most enterprise back-ends were built for transactions, isolated requests that begin and end in seconds. Conversation does not follow that rhythm. It requires continuity, context, and memory. It expects data, logic, and action to move in one fluid stream.
To achieve this, brands need systems that are event-driven, serverless, and interconnected through standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
Where MCP bridges the gap between understanding and execution, allowing AI models to access and act on enterprise data safely, ACP extends that bridge into commerce itself, enabling secure, real-time transactions initiated directly by AI agents.
In practice, this means a conversation can not only check an order or resolve a service issue but also complete a purchase, redeem a voucher, or book a service, all through compliant, agent-initiated flows. It turns language into logic and intent into immediate action.
This is where the competitive line will be drawn. The brands that thrive will not only speak through AI but think through it, powered by architectures ready to scale, listen, and respond at conversational speed.
Infrastructure Is the New Voice
Across industries, leaders are quietly rebuilding their digital foundations. Behind these advances lies the same principle: experience is only as strong as the infrastructure beneath it.
Serverless platforms, event orchestration, and real-time APIs are no longer engineering choices; they are the foundations of customer experience itself.
Retter has spent years developing this backbone. They built cloud-native and event-driven from day one, and the platform now powers millions of real-time interactions every day across commerce, service, and engagement. It allows brands to move from static, screen-based experiences to dynamic, conversation-ready ecosystems without rebuilding their core systems.
Within that infrastructure sits a real-time engagement engine that unites data, context, and action. It listens, interprets, and responds in milliseconds, whether that means resolving a support query, suggesting the next purchase, or triggering the right follow-up automatically.
This is what allows customer experience to evolve from process to presence. Every interaction becomes a learning moment. Every response becomes an act of understanding. Over time, the experience itself begins to think.
From Experience to Intelligence
As interfaces become conversational, experience becomes emotional.
Each delay feels heavier, each exchange more personal. Customers no longer separate buying from belonging or service from sentiment; they expect it all to happen in one seamless conversation.
Feedback, too, is changing shape. Traditional surveys are giving way to conversational insight, where sentiment is captured naturally and acted upon instantly. Real-time data and event-driven logic now close the loop between listening and response.
In this new landscape, customer experience stops being a set of touchpoints and becomes a living system: adaptive, predictive, and conversational by design.
Ready for What’s Next
The shift from touch to talk is not a trend. It’s a structural evolution of customer experience, one that will separate brands that adapt from those that fall behind. The brands that act now will shape the vocabulary of this new era. Those who hesitate will find themselves speaking a language their customers have already outgrown.
As generative AI, MCP frameworks, and voice-first interactions reshape customer experience, businesses will need partners whose infrastructure is already fluent in that new language.
Retter’s technology is not just compatible with the conversational future; it is built for it: a platform that listens, scales, and acts in real time.
When customers stop touching and start talking, the question will no longer be whether your brand is ready to listen, but whether your systems are built to respond.
