Peter Ruis: John Lewis Is Betting on AI, Resale and Expert Service

The biggest threat to John Lewis is no longer another department store.

That is how Peter Ruis, Managing Director of John Lewis, framed the competitive landscape on the Headliner Stage at Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona. Instead, Britain's most recognisable retailer now finds itself competing against specialist brands, social platforms, AI-powered search engines, marketplaces and technology giants for consumer attention, often within a single shopping journey rather than across separate ones.

Ruis, who returned to John Lewis in January 2024, was candid about how completely the environment has changed since he last led the business. "Everything's changed," he said. "We're in a post-COVID era in Britain. We're in a post-Brexit era. We've had global economic turbulence, inflation, the pound at levels we haven't seen in 50 years. It's a different environment, and we have to be much more radical."

Why John Lewis no longer thinks like a department store

For much of its history, John Lewis measured itself against other department stores: Debenhams, House of Fraser and similar names on the British high street.

That comparison no longer makes sense. With a £1 billion technology business, a 35% market share in home and one of the UK's largest e-commerce operations going back to 2001, John Lewis now sits among the top one to four players in most of the categories it competes in. Consumers, Ruis argued, do not think in terms of department stores any more. They think in terms of the best possible experience in a specific category, whether that is home, technology, beauty or fashion, and they assemble their own version of that experience across however many retailers it takes.

"We're probably the generalist retailer that needs to worry about specialist market leaders in single areas," Ruis said. The response has been to pivot deliberately, finding genuine points of difference rather than trying to compete on breadth alone.

What John Lewis believes it can offer that pure digital specialists cannot is trust built over generations, expressed through service that would be expensive and difficult to replicate at scale. The retailer's baby advisor service is the clearest example: a team built up over decades that has supported parents through one of the most significant purchasing moments of their lives. Mattress consultations that can run for an hour are another, the kind of considered, expert-led interaction that no marketplace listing can offer.

AI search is moving faster than anyone predicted

The discoverability challenge facing John Lewis is no longer about ranking on Google. It is about appearing inside the answers generated by AI systems before a customer ever sees a traditional search result.

Ruis shared figures that illustrate just how quickly this shift is accelerating. Search traffic arriving from large language models and AI-powered search tools is now over 2%, up from under 0.5% just a few months earlier. His expectation is that the figure could reach 5% within nine months, an extraordinary rate of change for any channel, let alone one that barely existed in retail eighteen months ago.

"It's going to move very, very quickly," Ruis said, "and we're working with our partners to make sure that when customers are searching, predominantly through tools like ChatGPT at the moment, we show up as quickly and as relevantly as possible."

The strategic question that follows discoverability is conversion. Once a customer is brought into John Lewis through an AI-driven discovery moment, the retailer's answer is its loyalty infrastructure: loyalty data, personalisation, price matching and discounting all working together so that the experience feels tailored rather than generic. "You don't need somebody to shout at you about everything," Ruis said. "You need the combination of care, loyalty, discounts and price matching to work for you specifically."

Social commerce is the next discovery channel, not the next sales channel

Alongside AI search, Ruis pointed to social commerce as one of the most significant near-term opportunities in retail, with the format projected to become a $16 billion market by 2030 and TikTok positioned as its dominant emergent platform.

John Lewis has moved early, launching a partnership with Topshop and integrating with Uber Eats to offer delivery within 30 minutes on selected items. Neither initiative is, in Ruis's words, primarily about revenue today. "When you're there early, it's not normally a huge revenue or profit driver," he said. "But you understand the game, and you understand where it's heading when it goes big."

That early positioning matters because the discovery journey itself has changed shape. Younger consumers in particular are discovering products through social search and creator content rather than through traditional retail browsing. Ruis pointed to Apple's most recent MacBook launch as an example: a product that many customers discovered first through social content and search rather than through a retailer's own marketing, with green and sustainable product launches following a similar pattern of social-driven discovery.

Why stores are becoming more valuable, not less

At a moment when many retailers are pulling back on physical retail investment, John Lewis is doing the opposite.

Ruis was candid that there was a period before the pandemic when investment in store environments, lighting and visual merchandising had slowed. That has reversed. The company is now investing significantly in its physical estate, and customers are responding to it. A recently introduced personal styling and beauty service in one of the stores produced a measurable halo effect, increasing engagement from a different segment of customer than the store would otherwise attract.

That halo effect is something John Lewis can measure with real precision. With around 6 million people in its loyalty scheme, the retailer can track customer behaviour with enough granularity to understand how a store visit influences purchasing across channels, even when the eventual transaction happens somewhere else entirely.

The economics of UK retail, rising business rates, employment costs and a minimum wage that has become increasingly difficult to absorb, are pushing many retailers away from physical space. Ruis sees that as an opportunity rather than purely a cost problem. Brands increasingly want partners who can offer something a pure marketplace listing cannot: genuine curation, a physical environment that builds emotional connection and an edge that justifies the cost of being there.

The quiet rise of resale

One of the clearest signals of changing consumer behaviour at John Lewis is the growing scale of its secondhand and resale business.

The most expensive single item John Lewis sold last year was not new. It was a secondhand Hermès handbag, sold for approximately £12,000. The retailer has built strong secondhand performance in jewellery and technology as well, categories where trust in authentication and quality matters enormously, and where John Lewis's existing reputation gives it a meaningful advantage over newer resale-only platforms.

Ruis expects circular retail to become significantly more important over the next decade, driven by both affordability pressure and a genuine shift in how consumers think about value and sustainability. "You've got to be at the party," he said. For a trusted retailer, resale is less a new business line than a natural extension of the relationship it already has with its customers.

Combining the old and the new

Asked to summarise his approach, Ruis returned to a phrase that captures what he is trying to build at John Lewis: the best of the old and the best of the new.

AI, in his view, is not a replacement for the trust and service John Lewis has built over generations. It is a tool that reduces the cost of serving customers through efficient digital channels, freeing up resources to reinvest in the kind of expert, human-led service that customers still clearly want when the purchase matters. Customers are not fully willing to trust AI on its own, Ruis argued. They use it as a powerful first step, a form of hyper-search, but they combine it with social validation and, for significant purchases, still want to talk to someone who genuinely knows what they are talking about.

"I think we can combine the two," he said. That, more than any single technology investment, is the bet John Lewis is making on its next chapter: AI for speed and reach, human expertise for trust and physical stores as the place where both come together.