For anyone that is skeptical about agentic commerce, the past couple of weeks have given us many reasons to believe Agentic Commerce is not just here to stay but could be the biggest disruptive force in digital commerce that has come about in several decades:

  • Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI to allow shoppers to purchase from within ChatGPT using agentic commerce, this shows Walmart views purchases from ChatGPT as either neutral or incremental to sales as AI platforms enable better discovery and are also becoming a starting point for many consumers’ shopping journeys.
  • Amazon after initially reacting by blocking shopping agents on Amazon, seems to have softened their stance. Andy Jassy in their latest earnings announcement said: “We’re also having conversations with and expect over time to partner with third-party agents. I think that it reminds me in some ways of the beginning of search engines many years ago being sources of discovery for commerce. You had to kind of figure out the right way to work together. Today, search engines are a very small part of our referral traffic, and third-party agents are a very small subset of that. I do think that we will find ways to partner. We have to find a way, though, that makes the customer experience good.
  • PayPal announced support for OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature by adopting ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) to make payments seamless for retailer adopting Instant Checkout. This will enable seamless, secure and privacy complaint purchase for consumers.

These are very significant moves by the world’s largest retailers and payment platforms to acknowledge the power of agentic commerce and the need to be where consumers are. The challenge for AI platforms is going to be to provide a superior user experience to what. the retailers provide on their own sites. Amazon has already implemented “Buy for me” where a consumer can buy products from other sites outside of Amazon so they clearly believe in agentic commerce.

What is not being discussed in this battle is how the brands will react. Recent conversations I have had with several CPG execs point to a significant opportunity for them to engage consumers directly during the discovery process within API platforms while keeping agentic commerce with retailers as the outcome.

This is a win-win-win-win for the AI platforms which become the starting point for consumer shopping journeys, for brands to be able to engage consumers with content they can use during discovery, for the retailers who ultimately will be getting the purchase, and most importantly for consumers who no longer have to struggle to narrow down and find the product they are looking to purchase. The experience is going to look like having a personal shopper at their side as they look for and find the product to purchase.