AI Voice Agents Take Over the Retail Sales Floor

Retail spent two years bolting chatbots onto websites that could field a shopper’s specific questions but never close a sale. Voice agents built on models like OpenAI’s GPT-Realtime are changing that, holding real sales conversations, asking the same probing questions a floor associate would and adapting as a shopper’s needs shift, all without a human ever stepping in. Japanese home-appliance retailer Yamada Denki turned its associates’ sales expertise into a 24/7 multilingual voice agent built