How AI Helped The Bear House Grow Its Conversions 5X

In recent years, artificial intelligence has transitioned from merely facilitating product searches and recommendations to autonomously making purchasing decisions for consumers. This shift in ecommerce has moved away from the traditional product discovery process, allowing customers to dictate their desired outcomes to an AI agent.

Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi and Glance, explained this concept of agentic commerce to Inc42 Media, highlighting how it streamlines the consumer shopping journey. Glance, a consumer technology platform under the InMobi Group, harnesses AI to deliver personalized shopping agents capable of making product suggestions, curating full outfits, and facilitating virtual try-ons based on signals like a customer's preferences, budget, context, and appearance.

The significance of this AI-driven approach was showcased at the seventh edition of Inc42's The D2C & Retail Summit 2026, where Shah, alongside Harsh Somaiya, co-founder of The Bear House, and Vaibhav Vardhan, co-founder and CEO of Inc42, discussed the implications of agentic commerce on consumer shopping behaviors. Somaiya detailed the challenges faced by The Bear House, a direct-to-consumer fashion brand, which included boosting conversions, extending customer engagement time, and minimizing product returns.

Prior to integrating Glance's AI shopping agent, customers typically spent only 30-50 seconds on the site, selecting a single item and completing a purchase. Post-deployment, the AI agent significantly boosted conversions by five times, tripled the average time spent on the site, and transformed shopping habits to include the purchase of complete looks instead of individual products. Furthermore, the average order value escalated from ₹2,000 to ₹3,500.

Glance's virtual try-on feature has played a pivotal role in this transformation, contributing to a 20% reduction in returns. For brands, the benefits of agentic commerce extend beyond mere transactions; they provide invaluable insights into customer intent, informing future product development. Shah emphasized that this evolution in ecommerce requires brands to pivot from attracting website visitors to being the definitive answer to a consumer's expressed intent.

As AI progressively eliminates the need for customers to navigate search, comparison, and evaluation stages, brands that leverage these AI capabilities are poised to gain a competitive edge in the next phase of ecommerce. The evolution of agentic commerce marks a pivotal shift in the industry, emphasizing the importance of understanding and fulfilling consumer intent.