From disappearing shopfronts to virtual stores, AI actors and robotic hospitality, what happens to the brand when technology changes almost everything around it?
Thirty years ago, the natural progression of a growing consumer brand seemed relatively easy to understand.
You developed a product. You built a customer base. You expanded your distribution. And somewhere in that journey sat the ambition of opening your own shop.
I still like that image.
But I am no longer convinced that a physical shop is necessarily the ultimate expression of growth.
The High Street I Remember
The British high street has changed enormously during my lifetime.
I remember streets with a greater variety of independent shops and specialist retailers, businesses that gave different towns their individual character.
Today, anyone considering physical retail faces a difficult question: does the investment required to establish and operate a store still make sense when the way people discover and buy products is changing so quickly?
For APPLE & BEARS, that question has become increasingly relevant.
Our online presence can reach somebody without us needing a shop on their high street. Search engines introduce readers to our articles. Social platforms introduce the brand visually. AI systems are becoming another route through which people discover companies and products.
The shopfront hasn’t disappeared. It is changing form.
Something Happened on Television
On 14 September 2026, something on British breakfast television caught my attention.
ITV’s Good Morning Britain featured Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated actress, and her creator Eline Van der Velden, in a segment with Susanna Reid and Ed Balls.
Watch the Good Morning Britain interview on YouTube
An AI-generated actress had become sufficiently culturally relevant to feature in a mainstream breakfast television interview.
Not in 2046. In 2026.
That does not tell us exactly what the future will look like. It does show how quickly something that sounds futuristic can enter ordinary public life.
Hospitality provides another glimpse.
South African trade publication Hospitality Marketplace has reported on AI across booking, operations and food service, including robot waiters at Johannesburg’s Tang Palace. Its coverage also explores emerging kitchen robotics while recognising that these technologies are not yet mainstream.
Read Hospitality Marketplace's “Hospitality Rewired” feature
These are early examples of a transition already under way.
What Happens When AI Leaves the Screen?
I believe the next stage will be much bigger.
As artificial intelligence and robotics develop together, I expect machines to become part of everyday activity across hospitality, manufacturing, retail, logistics and other industries.
I can envisage hotels where AI handles much of the reservation process and elements of customer service, while machines assist with physical tasks elsewhere. I can envisage manufacturing environments where fewer people supervise increasingly autonomous processes.
And I can envisage a very different retail experience.
I may be wrong about the speed. I don’t believe I am wrong about the direction.
We Didn’t Just Write About It
In February 2024, APPLE & BEARS published an article under my co-founder Kay Butt’s name titled Revolutionizing Retail: APPLE & BEARS Introduce Human Avatars for a Sustainable Shopping Experience.
The concept was deliberately human: real people working remotely through avatars inside a virtual APPLE & BEARS store.
Read the original 2024 APPLE & BEARS article
Behind that article lay a more ambitious project.
In 2024, alongside APPLE & BEARS, I began developing a concept called INTELIA. The ambition was to create immersive three-dimensional environments in which businesses could operate virtual stores and customers could interact with representatives through avatars.
We explored the commerce platforms, user interface, real-time communication and artificial intelligence required to connect the experience, including the potential use of NVIDIA technologies such as Omniverse.
We even reached the stage of visualising where a human avatar might stand inside the virtual-store interface.
Then we stopped.
Not because I stopped believing in the idea. The economics stopped us.
Building it properly required substantial development resources and capital. For us, the commitment became too great, so we shelved it.
Looking back from 2026, I find that decision fascinating. Capabilities we once contemplated building or connecting ourselves are increasingly becoming available as infrastructure upon which businesses can build.
NVIDIA’s digital-human and retail AI technologies illustrate that shift, from ACE to its Retail Shopping Assistant Blueprint.
Explore NVIDIA's digital-human and retail AI technologies
NVIDIA Retail and CPG Developer Resources
In 2024, we were trying to work out how to put a person behind an avatar.
Today, I find myself asking whether the person necessarily has to be there at all.
Can the Virtual Store Become Better Than the Physical Store?
With INTELIA, we weren’t simply trying to reproduce a website in three dimensions.
We were asking whether a virtual store could eventually offer an experience as good as, or in some respects better than, walking into a physical shop.
Consider attention.
In a busy store, even the best salesperson must divide their time. Somebody waits. Somebody receives less help. Somebody feels rushed.
An intelligent virtual store could operate differently.
Imagine entering APPLE & BEARS and Lucy greets you. For that visit, her attention is yours. You can ask questions, explore ingredients, compare products or browse quietly and call her back when needed.
Meanwhile, other customers could have separate interactions with their own instances of Lucy.
Perhaps you prefer Tom, equally familiar with APPLE & BEARS. Perhaps you want detailed guidance, or simply a direct answer before being left to browse.
The representative could adapt to the customer, rather than requiring every customer to adapt to the salesperson. Products and information could be brought forward according to what that person wants to explore.
That is what interests me: the potential to make personal service scalable.
Physical retail would retain important advantages. You can pick up a bottle, experience a fragrance and have an unexpected conversation with another human being. Technology cannot currently reproduce all of that.
But a virtual store would not have to choose between London, New York, Johannesburg and Tokyo, or depend on conventional opening hours.
The doorway could be everywhere.
When Everybody Has a Lucy
But there is a problem.
If APPLE & BEARS can have Lucy or Tom, eventually everybody can.
The same applies to sophisticated AI marketing, automated administration and increasingly capable operational systems. Competitors will have access to similar tools.
The extraordinary eventually becomes ordinary.
When everybody has access to extraordinary technology, what remains uniquely yours?
My answer is the brand.
Technology Is Not the Brand
A shop, a website, Instagram and an AI assistant are channels through which somebody encounters a brand. They are not the brand itself.
A brand exists somewhere deeper: in its identity, reputation, product philosophy, intellectual property and the decisions and relationships accumulated over time.
A competitor may gain access to comparable AI, automation and virtual environments.
But it cannot download our history.
It cannot retrospectively create the decisions that built APPLE & BEARS or simply reproduce the relationships and experiences attached to our name.
Technology can reproduce capability. It cannot automatically reproduce provenance.
I think that distinction will become increasingly important.
What Happens to the Human?
None of this means human beings cease to matter.
If machines perform more of the repeatable work surrounding a business, human judgement becomes even more important in deciding what those machines represent.
Somebody must establish the boundaries: what the company stands for, how customers should be treated and what happens when commercial opportunity conflicts with its principles.
For now, that responsibility rests with people.
Several decades from now, could an AI become the chief executive of a company?
I no longer think that is a ridiculous question.
Who Owns the Idea?
If an AI can one day manage operations, analyse markets, communicate with customers and supervise automated manufacturing, who controls the company?
Who owns its intellectual property? Who determines its purpose? Who carries responsibility?
I don’t pretend to know what corporate ownership will look like several decades from now.
But I know what matters to me today.
APPLE & BEARS is an idea that we own and continue to shape. Technology can help us express it, introduce it to new people and represent it in ways that once seemed impossible.
It does not remove the question of who decides what the business should be.
The Store I Never Built
Perhaps one day we will still open that APPLE & BEARS shop I once imagined. I wouldn’t rule it out.
But I no longer regard bricks and mortar as the destination that proves a brand has arrived.
Perhaps you will enter our future store without leaving your house. Perhaps Lucy or Tom will welcome you. Perhaps a physical robotic representative will eventually do the same.
Whichever technology sits between APPLE & BEARS and the person experiencing it, the identity on the other side must remain recognisably ours.
When extraordinary technology becomes available to everybody, possessing it will no longer be enough to distinguish a business.
What matters will be what it represents, and why anyone should care.
When AI changes everything, who will still be standing?
Dean Butt
Co-founder, APPLE & BEARS
