Industry View · Retail & E-commerce

The checkout is being rebuilt around the agent, not the shopper

Generative AI moved from merchandising copy to the buy button in 2025. AI sources drove a 693% jump in retail-site traffic over the holidays and influenced roughly $262 billion in online sales, while the payment networks raced to certify agent-initiated transactions. The prize is control of the discovery layer; the risk is that retailers become commoditized inventory behind someone else's agent.

Demonstrated ROIROI Classification

Amazon credits Rufus ~$12B incremental sales; Walmart Sparky ~35% higher AOV

Key Figures

$262B

Sales AI influenced last holiday season (~20% of online orders)

Salesforce

693%

YoY rise in generative-AI traffic to US retail sites, 2025 holidays

Adobe Analytics

$60.4B

Agentic AI in retail/e-commerce market, 2026 est.

Mordor Intelligence

~$12B

Incremental annualized sales Amazon attributes to Rufus

Amazon / PYMNTS

Value Chain

Discovery

The agent replaces the search bar

Conversational assistants are becoming the front door to commerce, displacing keyword search and SEO-driven discovery.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky

Personalization

From rules to generative recommendation

Real-time, context-aware ranking and styling replace static recommendation engines and merchandising rules.

Constructor, Bloomreach, Algolia, Daydream

Conversion

Agentic checkout and instant buy

Purchases complete inside the chat surface via agent-initiated, tokenized payments rather than the retailer's funnel.

Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay, PayPal/Perplexity, Klarna APP

Merchant ops

AI runs the back office

Copy, catalog enrichment, pricing, and store automation are generated and managed by embedded assistants.

Shopify Sidekick/Magic, Salesforce Agentforce, Klarna APP

Service

Support automated first, rebalanced later

AI resolves the bulk of routine contacts, but firms are re-adding humans for premium tiers after overcutting.

Klarna AI, vendor copilots

01 · The thesis

Discovery is the new battleground; everything downstream is being commoditized

For two decades the retail moat was the storefront and the search box: own where the shopper starts, own the margin. Generative AI severs that. When a shopper asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Rufus what to buy, the agent — not the retailer — frames the choice set, and AI referrals now convert ~31% better than other traffic while still under 1% of total volume. The interface is moving up a layer, and whoever owns it owns intent. The second-order effect is disintermediation. 81% of retail executives expect generative AI to weaken brand loyalty by 2027, and a third of brands already report falling upper-funnel search traffic. Retailers face a forced choice: build their own agent (those that did grew sales ~59% faster than peers, per Salesforce) or list their catalog inside someone else's — Etsy, Target and Walmart have done both, joining ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. The winners will be the platforms that sit closest to the moment of intent and the infrastructure that settles the transaction.

The agent replaces the search bar

Conversational assistants are becoming the front door to commerce, displacing keyword search and SEO-driven discovery.

From rules to generative recommendation

Real-time, context-aware ranking and styling replace static recommendation engines and merchandising rules.

Agentic checkout and instant buy

Purchases complete inside the chat surface via agent-initiated, tokenized payments rather than the retailer's funnel.

AI runs the back office

Copy, catalog enrichment, pricing, and store automation are generated and managed by embedded assistants.

Support automated first, rebalanced later

AI resolves the bulk of routine contacts, but firms are re-adding humans for premium tiers after overcutting.

02 · The two clocks

Three timers are running at once: adoption is fast, infrastructure is mid-build, and trust lags both.

Adoption is the fastest clock. Holiday 2025 traffic to US retail sites from generative-AI sources rose 693% year-over-year, and AI-driven revenue per visit was up 254% — a curve that compounds rather than plateaus, even though AI is still under 1% of total retail traffic today. Infrastructure is mid-build. The networks shipped the plumbing in 2025-26 — Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay (its first non-US transaction ran in the UAE) — while OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol compete to become the standard. Settlement works; the open question is which protocol wins. Trust is the lagging clock and the real constraint. Bain finds ~50% of consumers are wary of fully autonomous purchases, yet a majority of those who use AI to shop say it makes them more confident. The gap between assisted and autonomous buying is where 2026 will actually be decided.

03 · Public players & exposure

Who routes through, who gets routed around

We plot the listed players on two editorial axes — how exposed each is to AI disruption, against how ready its data, brand and position are to be the answer. The figures in the table are sourced; the placement is our read.

04 · Private flagships

The AI-native challengers

The companies attacking this industry AI-first, with disclosed funding where available:

Amazon Rufus

Amazon's shopping assistant scaled to 300M+ users in 2025 and is being unified with Alexa+, anchoring Amazon's defense of demand capture.

Shopify Sidekick

Turns the Shopify admin into a conversational command center for catalog, automations and insights across millions of stores.

Daydream

A generative discovery marketplace betting that lower-friction, highly personalized fashion search beats both legacy retail and general chatbots.

Klarna AI Assistant

Beyond support automation, Klarna's Agentic Product Protocol exposes 100M+ products and 400M+ price points to shopping agents.

Perplexity Instant Buy

In-chat purchasing with PayPal across thousands of merchants, positioning the answer engine as a transactional surface.

Visa Intelligent Commerce

A single integration to let trusted AI agents transact, with agent-initiated payments completed in early pilots.

05 · Signals

What moved, and what to watch

06 · The exposure read

Who’s defensible, who’s at risk

AI rewards clean, structured advantage and punishes friction. The line runs through who owns the data, the brand and the customer — and who is merely a step the technology can route around.

Sources

Where this comes from

The spend, and the payoff

Generative AI's pull on holiday retail, 2025 season (YoY)

Source: Adobe Analytics, 2025 US holiday shopping data (% YoY change)

Who's defensible, who's at risk

Amazon (AMZN): More than 300 million customers used Rufus in 2025; Amazon credits it with ~$12B in incremental annualized sales and says Rufus users are ~60% more likely to purchase (Amazon / PYMNTS).
Walmart (WMT): Sparky, launched June 2025, was tried by ~half of Walmart app users; Sparky users show ~35% higher average order value, per Walmart's Q4 FY26 call (PYMNTS / Walmart).
Shopify (SHOP): Sidekick and Agentic Storefronts make Shopify the embedded-AI layer for merchants; embedded-platform agents held an estimated leading share of the agentic-commerce platform market in 2025 (ResearchIntelo).
Mercado Libre (MELI): Q2 2025 revenue rose 34% YoY on $15.3B GMV (up 21%), funding heavy AI investment across its logistics and fintech stack (SEC 8-K, MELI).
Klarna (KLAR): Its OpenAI assistant did the work of ~853 agents and ~$60M in annual savings by Q3 2025, but Klarna reopened human hiring after cutting too deep (OpenAI / Klarna).
Salesforce (CRM): Agentforce Commerce embeds agentic AI in Commerce Cloud; Salesforce reports retailers running their own agents grew sales ~59% faster than peers (Salesforce).
OpenAI (priv): Launched Instant Checkout Sept 2025 with Etsy, Instacart and Walmart, then sunset it March 2026 after weak uptake (fewer than 30 Shopify merchants), pivoting to discovery (CNBC / Forrester / Modern Retail).
Visa (V): Visa Intelligent Commerce offers a single integration for AI-agent payments, with agent-initiated transactions completed in early pilots (Visa / TechInformed).
Perplexity (priv): Launched Instant Buy with PayPal in Dec 2025, enabling in-chat purchase from merchants including Wayfair and Abercrombie & Fitch (Modern Retail / PayPal).
Daydream (priv): Raised a $50M seed to launch a generative AI fashion discovery and shopping-agent marketplace, led by ex-Stitch Fix/Sephora exec Julie Bornstein (Fortune / Crunchbase).

Defensible vs At Risk

Defensible

Demand aggregators with first-party intent — Amazon and Walmart convert assistant usage into measurable order-value and conversion lift while keeping the customer relationship.
Merchant-arming platforms — Shopify and Salesforce monetize the shift by embedding agents into millions of stores rather than competing for the shopper directly.
Payment networks — Visa and Mastercard turn protocol-agnostic agent settlement into a toll on every agentic transaction, a structurally advantaged position.
Specialist personalization infrastructure — Constructor, Bloomreach and Daydream win where generic chatbots underperform on taste-driven, high-consideration categories like fashion.

At Risk

Brands reduced to commodity inventory — 81% of retail executives expect generative AI to weaken brand loyalty by 2027 as agents, not logos, frame the choice set.
SEO- and affiliate-dependent intermediaries — content sites and comparison shoppers lose upper-funnel traffic as discovery moves into closed AI surfaces; a third of brands already report search-traffic declines.
Sub-scale retailers without an agent strategy — those neither building their own agent nor listed inside the major ones risk invisibility; agent-running peers grew sales ~59% faster.
AI-first cost-cutters that overshoot — Klarna's public walk-back on human support shows that gutting service ahead of the technology's reliability invites reputational and operational cost.

The signals — how it unfolded

Sept 2025

OpenAI ships Instant Checkout

ChatGPT adds in-chat purchase with Etsy, Instacart and Walmart on the Agentic Commerce Protocol — the first mass-market agentic checkout.

Dec 2025

Perplexity + PayPal launch Instant Buy

In-chat purchasing rolls out across Wayfair, Abercrombie and thousands of PayPal merchants, opening a second agentic surface.

Holiday 2025

AI influences ~$262B of online sales

Salesforce data shows AI touching ~20% of global online orders; Adobe finds AI traffic to retail sites up 693% YoY.

Mar 2026

OpenAI sunsets Instant Checkout

Citing weak uptake (fewer than 30 Shopify merchants), OpenAI pivots from transactions to discovery — a reminder that agentic buying is unproven at scale.

Jun 2026

Mastercard Agent Pay goes international

First non-US agent transaction completes in the UAE with Majid Al Futtaim, signaling the rails are productizing globally.

Challengers to watch