The Agentic AI Shopping Revolution is Here – Are You Ready?

Imagine asking an AI assistant to find and buy the perfect pair of running shoes – and it handles everything from search to payment, instantly. This isn’t sci-fi; it’s happening now. In late September 2025, OpenAI began trialing “Buy it in ChatGPT” in the U.S., letting ChatGPT not just recommend products but purchase them on your behalf. It started with Etsy sellers and is expanding to over a million Shopify merchants orangeseo.net. This is agentic commerce in action – AI agents shopping for us – and it could remake retail as profoundly as the dawn of e-commerce did (only much faster) mckinsey.commckinsey.com.

A New Era of AI-Powered Shopping

Agentic AI means autonomous shopping agents that anticipate needs, compare options, negotiate deals, and execute transactions – all aligned to your preferences. By 2030, McKinsey predicts these AI shopping agents could orchestrate up to $1 trillion in U.S. retail sales (and $3–5 trillion globally) mckinsey.com. In other words, AI “co-pilots” are poised to become the new gatekeepers of commerce, mediating how consumers find and buy products (McKinsey.com). More than half of consumers already expect to use AI assistants for shopping by end of 2025 and early data shows AI-driven shoppers are more engaged and further along the purchase funnel than traditional shoppers bcg.com. The momentum is undeniable.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT trial is the first large-scale glimpse: 700+ million people use ChatGPT weekly, and now it can take you “from chat to checkout” in a seamless flow orangeseo.net. Crucially, OpenAI says ChatGPT’s product results in this pilot are organic and unsponsored, purely based on relevance openai.com. For now, the AI isn’t biased by ad dollars. But you can imagine where this goes next.

Early Adopters: The Next Facebook Ads Moment?

Remember the halcyon early days of Facebook advertising, when you could spend a little and get a huge return? Being an early adopter of a new ad platform was like catching lightning in a bottle. I see a parallel coming with agentic AI. Ad space on AI shopping agents isn’t a reality (yet), but it’s likely around the corner – think within 1-2 years. Industry watchers expect that after this initial “organic” phase, paid placements will arrive orangeseo.netorangeseo.net. In fact, Boston Consulting Group notes early examples already popping up (Google’s AI search ads, Perplexity’s sponsored answers) and predicts conversational ad formats like sponsored product answers are on the horizon bcg.com.

What does that mean for businesses? Potentially, an early-adopter gold rush. The first brands to integrate with AI agents and experiment with agentic commerce could see outsized gains in reach and ROI, before the crowd piles in. Indeed, U.S. spending on AI-driven search ads is projected to skyrocket from about $1 billion now to $26 billion by 2029 orangeseo.net – roughly 14% of all search advertising. We’re at the dawn of a new marketing channel. As much as I personally might love to not funnel more budget to Meta, this presents an opportunity no retailer should ignore. Those who get in early on AI agents could enjoy a period of low-cost, high-return advertising reminiscent of Facebook’s glory days – high gains for those who move first.

Less Choice, New Challenges?

That said, this brave new world raises some ethical and practical questions. How much control will we, as consumers, have over the choices an AI agent presents us? If the AI becomes the trusted gatekeeper, we need transparency on why it picked those top 1-2 options. Today, ChatGPT’s shopping suggestions don’t carry “Ad” labels and are purely relevance-based openai.com. But in the future, if monetisation kicks in, it could resemble Google Ads – whoever bids highest for a keyword or placement gets the top spot. Imagine an AI only showing you one “best” running shoe because a brand paid for it. That’s even less choice than a Google search results page, which at least shows a few paid and organic links. In a chat interface, there are no obvious ad labels or multiple blue links – meaning consumers might not even realise if a recommendation was sponsored orangeseo.net. The onus will be on AI platforms to maintain trust through transparency about ranking algorithms and sponsorship.

The advertising landscape could become incredibly competitive. Big brands with big budgets might outbid everyone to have their product be the recommendation an AI agent gives. Smaller brands could struggle to be seen at all. This raises fairness and diversity concerns in the marketplace: will AI agents funnel us toward only the highest bidders or those who “game” the algorithm?

How Smaller Brands Can Compete

For small and mid-sized retailers, surviving in an agentic commerce world means being proactive. One strategy being discussed is AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation – basically the next evolution of SEO for AI assistants. It’s about making your brand and product data highly relevant and machine-readable so that AI agents organically pick your products when answering shopper queries wearephaedon.com. Just like we optimised websites for Google search, now we’ll optimise product feeds for AI reasoning. Rich descriptions, up-to-date inventory, competitive pricing, stellar reviews – all these factors will influence an AI’s “choice set.” In fact, “Generative AI Optimisation” (also called GEO) and similar strategies are emerging to ensure brands show up in AI-driven results orangeseo.netorangeseo.net.

Most importantly, retailers should integrate wherever possible with the AI platforms. If an AI agent can directly check out your product within its chat interface, you’re ahead. OpenAI’s trial, for example, favors merchants that support its Instant Checkout – it’s one of the factors that can boost a product’s ranking in ChatGPT’s results openai.comorangeseo.net. This makes sense: the platform wants to give users a frictionless experience. So, a smaller brand that enables seamless in-AI purchases might rank higher than a bigger brand that doesn’t. Bottom line: ensure your e-commerce systems can talk to AI agent protocols (like OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol openai.com). It could be the difference between being recommended to hundreds of millions of AI users or being invisible.

There’s also a broader point about trust and control. As marketers, we’ll need to grapple with how to ensure our products are presented fairly by AI agents. And as consumers, we’ll demand clarity: if the “digital personal shopper” only shows certain brands, we’ll want to know if that’s because they truly are the best match or because of paid prioritization. These are new challenges in transparency, algorithmic ethics, and even regulation that will unfold as agentic commerce grows.

The Fast-Moving Future

All told, this is an extremely fast-moving landscape. Just in the past year, players from Visa to Google to Shopify have rushed to build AI shopping capabilities orangeseo.net. New features are landing every month (multi-item AI carts and in-chat price tracking are already on the roadmap orangeseo.netorangeseo.net). As a business coach in retail, I’m watching this trend closely and making it a key topic in conversations with clients and peers. The consensus so far: it’s reminiscent of the early days of e-commerce or social media – those who adapted quickly thrived, those who dismissed it got left behind.

My advice to retailers and marketers: experiment early. Get your products into these AI platforms, even if in beta programs. Use AI tools yourself to understand the consumer experience. Upskill your team on data feeds and AI optimisation. Most of all, don’t let fear (or ethical hesitations) stop you from participating. Yes, we should absolutely discuss and shape the ethics – but opting out entirely could mean forfeiting a significant competitive edge. The reality is that those who overcome their fears and embrace these AI tools now will likely reap the benefits, ethics or not. As one report put it, companies that adapt quickly will redefine their industries, while those that hesitate risk losing ground as AI agents become the new gatekeepers mckinsey.com.

I find this space fascinating and a bit daunting all at once. It’s rewiring how consumers and brands connect. Being an early adopter will have its advantages (just ask the businesses that first mastered Google SEO or Facebook Ads). The playing field is being reset, and everyone – from retail giants to indie brands – has a chance to stake a claim in the AI-driven marketplace.

Are you excited about letting AI agents take over your shopping, or does it make you uneasy?
For brands: are you preparing for a world where you might be marketing to an algorithm as much as to a human?
Let’s chat – this is a conversation we all need to be having, because the change is already underway.