Agentic AI at Migros Online: Autonomous Engineering Agents and Conversational Shopping

AI agents are arriving at both ends of e-commerce at once. Inside product engineering organizations, they are starting to take on real delivery work: migrations, routine fixes, and the long tail of changes that quietly consume engineering focus. On the product, customers are beginning to shop through AI assistants instead of browsers, and they will expect products and baskets to be reachable from a conversation.

At Migros Online, the online supermarket of Switzerland's largest retail group, we are exploring both movements in parallel. On the engineering side, we are working toward autonomous agents that reliably handle background work, with the guardrails and context this requires. On the product, we are experimenting with conversational shopping by opening our catalogue to AI assistants through integrations such as MCP.

In this talk, we share why we believe an e-commerce company needs to invest on both sides at once, how we approached each experiment during our internal Hackweeks, and a look at our learnings: what worked, what did not, and what we would do differently.