E-commerce continues to eat up an ever-increasing share of the U.S. retail market: Americans bought more than $3.3 billion worth of items online every day in the second quarter of last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Online retail’s share of spending is increasing with each year that passes.
Traditionally, that’s meant typing a term or phrase into a search bar and clicking through to a shopping basket. But the artificial intelligence revolution is poised to swamp online retail, too, with agentic AI set to shop on behalf of customers. The e-commerce sector is rapidly preparing for what’s about to come—an influx of nonhuman customers acting on behalf of humans.
“We avoid hype around technology, but AI agentic shopping could bring huge changes to retail if it is widely adopted,” says Clare Walsh, director of education at the Institute of Analytics, a professional body for data analytics experts.
The usually staid professional organization is full-throated in its belief that agentic AI shopping could change society. “AI-empowered agentic shoppers—robots that learn your shopping needs and preferences and then shop for you—have the potential to be as disruptive for e-commerce as moving bricks-and-mortar retail online [was],” Walsh says.
Those within the retail sector are equally enamored with the concept of AI’s arrival. “For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, said in a statement announcing his company’s partnership with OpenAI, which will enable shoppers to buy things directly through ChatGPT with the aid of AI agents. “That is about to change.”
The early data suggests that the reality is matching the hype. AI-driven traffic to retail sites was up 4,700% in the U.S. in the last 12 months, according to Visa. “The future isn’t coming; it’s already checking out,” says Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth at the credit card company.
Shoppers want AI to help them, according to Birwadker, who points to research that 85% of shoppers say AI agents improved their experience. Separate research, provided to Fast Company by consumer insights company GWI, suggests 1 in 5 people are comfortable receiving product recommendations from AI agents. Data from consulting firm Kearney indicates 60% of consumers plan to use AI agents to shop in the next year.
But ensuring those shopping interactions are secure is trickier.
Investment in cleaner data
In mid-October, Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), a framework that would allow AI agents to share and access data that would ensure it can protect against fraud and bot activity. “This enables merchants to avoid blocking legitimate transactions and degrading user experience,” Birwadker says.
For now, TAP applies only to the Visa network. But having established it across their payments system, the massive payment processing giant intends on broadening its use. “Enabling agents to safely and securely act on a consumer’s behalf requires an open ecosystem-wide approach, and we will look to extend Trusted Agent Protocol to be compatible with other payment networks and methods in future phases,” Birwadker says.
The behind-the-scenes transfer of data is where most within the e-commerce sector are rushing to catch up to what they predict is coming with the advent of agentic AI shoppers, says Robin Anderson, head of product management at Tribe Payments, a global paytech company. “We’re seeing investment in cleaner data, faster checkouts, stronger fraud controls, and tighter integrations between systems,” he says. “This is because an AI agent will make a buying decision in seconds, and if there’s friction—a payment fails, a price isn’t clear—the sale’s gone.” Anderson believes “the arrival of AI shopping agents is going to change e-commerce in quite a fundamental way.”
An agent-to-agent future
The future of shopping is agent to agent, agrees Bernadette Nixon, CEO of Algolia, an AI search company. “The transaction will happen on the back end,” she says. It won’t be a series of blue links. It won’t be a product listing page or a product detail page. It’ll be the transaction.” And for that reason, it needs to be seamless. That requires accurate data—which means public data scraping won’t suffice. “Just scraping brands or retailers’ websites doesn’t yield the necessary information to provide a good user experience,” she says, “because they don’t have accurate pricing. They don’t have accurate inventory.”
Protocols and the companies behind them are therefore crucial. Visa is far from the only company in the space. Online payments company Stripe has its own Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard developed in conjunction with OpenAI.
It all opens up new opportunities for businesses, says Daniel Ruhman, CEO, and cofounder of Cumbuca, a fintech company in São Paulo, Brazil, where early AI agent adoption has run ahead of other countries.
“You could ask ChatGPT or Claude to ‘find me a handbag,’ navigate checkout pages, and have your agent handle the payment for you—all with your consent,” Ruhman says. That’s standard, but agentic AI could go further. “Through this, agents can even access your financial data to offer spending insights or advice,” he adds. “It’s what we call ‘agentic open finance,’ where an AI agent connects to your bank account—with your permission—to help you understand and manage your money.”
