Should a business automate the whole customer shopping experience?
Whether to automate a shopping step depends on whether your customers enjoy it, and you'll have to ask them. Break the experience into tasks and find out where they want help and where they want control.
One perspective in the anticipatory-experiences panel was that shopping can be enjoyable, and it's more than work to hand off. That's a question for your own customers, and it says nothing either way about automating every step or preserving every existing interaction.
Comparing dimensions and checking availability may feel different from exploring colors or speaking with someone knowledgeable. The answer shifts across people, categories and occasions. Someone might want a routine reorder handled fast and still enjoy browsing for a gift. Both can be true.
Judge it by the customer's task
Design the help so the choice stays visible: from a recommendation to the details, to an alternative, to a person when needed. Then check what happens when they decline. Choosing differently shouldn't make anything harder.
See whether the assistance removed a burden they didn't want and whether it kept the part they came to enjoy. I'd weigh that above a count of how many interactions the system automated.