customer engagement
GlobeNewswire
Published on : Nov 13, 2026
The growing gap between product discovery and purchase completion has become a challenge for consumer brands operating across digital and physical channels. Customers may discover products through social media advertisements, search results or messaging campaigns, but converting that interest often requires navigating multiple pages, comparing products and completing separate checkout or support processes.
ZEPIC is attempting to address this fragmentation with Neura, an agentic AI platform that turns customer-facing conversations into interactive storefronts. Rather than directing shoppers through conventional browsing journeys, the technology allows them to ask questions, discover products, check inventory, access offers and initiate transactions through a conversational interface.
The platform can be accessed through brand websites, WhatsApp and advertising or search entry points, including links from Google Business Profiles. Its central proposition is to make the conversation itself the shopping experience, reducing the number of steps between product discovery and purchase.
Neura differs from conventional retail chatbots by combining product discovery, sales assistance and customer support within a single AI agent. Traditional conversational tools often operate within narrowly defined functions, such as answering frequently asked questions, recommending products or tracking orders.
ZEPIC says Neura maintains customer context across interactions, allowing conversations to continue after identity verification rather than restarting with every new request. Shoppers can ask about pricing, product specifications, availability, promotional offers and delivery, while the agent can also assist with returns, replacements and order changes.
This approach reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI from systems that primarily generate responses toward agents capable of executing predefined business processes. Neura is designed to follow brand-specific procedures and interact with connected business applications rather than simply directing customers to another webpage.
The platform also connects to commerce and operational infrastructure, including Shopify, Magento, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and point-of-sale (POS) systems. ZEPIC says Neura can also work with applications that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling integrations with external business tools. This gives the agent access to information needed to respond to product and order-related queries and execute predefined workflows.
One notable feature is its ability to connect online product discovery with physical retail inventory. If an item is unavailable online, Neura can identify nearby stores that have it in stock and direct the customer there. For retailers with distributed inventory, this could help connect digital demand with store-level availability.
Neura also collects zero-party data through conversations. Instead of relying exclusively on browsing behavior, inferred interests or historical purchase records, the agent can capture preferences such as product sizes, budgets and personal requirements directly from customers. These insights can then be written back to a brand's CRM.
For marketing and customer experience teams, this creates another potential source of customer intelligence. However, the value will depend on data quality, consent management, identity resolution and how effectively brands incorporate conversational insights into segmentation and personalization strategies.
The launch comes as retailers increasingly explore AI-powered shopping experiences. According to the Capgemini Research Institute's 2026 consumer research, 73% of consumers had used chatbots for queries, but only 57% reported satisfaction with the experience. The gap highlights an important industry problem: chatbot adoption does not automatically translate into effective customer engagement.
Neura enters a market that includes conversational commerce providers, AI customer service platforms and emerging agentic commerce infrastructure. Shopify is expanding AI-driven commerce through its agentic storefront capabilities, while Salesforce is developing commerce and customer service workflows through Agentforce. Adobe is also investing in AI-powered digital experiences and commerce capabilities.
Neura's positioning is somewhat different. Rather than focusing primarily on making product catalogs available to external AI shopping assistants, it emphasizes a brand-controlled conversational interface connected to customer context, inventory and operational workflows. Its differentiation will depend on how reliably it can execute transactions and service procedures across existing enterprise systems.
The wider market opportunity is substantial. CB Insights, citing McKinsey projections, has highlighted the potential for agentic commerce to generate $1 trillion in US retail revenue by 2030. However, that forecast represents a broader market opportunity, not a prediction of Neura's commercial performance.
For enterprise marketing teams, Neura introduces a potential shift from campaign-led customer journeys toward conversation-led commerce. Brands could use advertisements, search listings and messaging campaigns as entry points into an AI-assisted shopping experience rather than sending every interested customer to a conventional product page.
The commercial challenge will be ensuring that the agent provides accurate product information, respects customer preferences, protects personal data and escalates complex requests to human employees. Brands will also need to evaluate conversion rates, average order value, resolution times and customer satisfaction against existing digital channels.
ZEPIC says Neura can be configured through written or voice instructions without coding, with pilot customer GoGizmo describing its use for product availability checks and directing shoppers to nearby stores. The company has not disclosed independent performance benchmarks, pricing or detailed deployment figures for the new storefront offering.
Neura's launch reflects an emerging direction in retail technology: AI agents that connect customer conversations with actual business operations. Whether this model becomes a meaningful alternative to conventional ecommerce journeys will depend less on conversational capabilities alone and more on its ability to deliver reliable, measurable commercial outcomes.
Conversational storefronts: ZEPIC Neura turns advertisements, search listings and messaging interactions into shopping conversations, potentially reducing friction across customer acquisition journeys.
Agentic customer engagement: One AI agent handles discovery, sales and support, helping consumer brands connect previously fragmented customer-facing operations.
Commerce system integration: Shopify, Magento, CRM and POS connections allow Neura to access product information, inventory and predefined business workflows.
Zero-party data collection: Conversational interactions capture customer preferences directly, creating additional intelligence for personalization, merchandising and marketing teams.
Omnichannel retail experience: Store-level inventory discovery connects online shoppers with nearby physical locations, potentially supporting retailers with distributed inventory.
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