What Should Retailers Do About AI Shoppers?

The first and only buying conversation for some consumers might soon be between two digital entities: the consumer’s shopping agent and a vendor’s systems. Artificial intelligence agents—autonomous systems that act on behalf of users, from research to purchase—are rapidly reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and buy products. In agent-to-agent (A2A) commerce, features such as Amazon’s “Buy for Me” are already automating large chunks of the customer journey. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini are crawling vendor sites, reviewing options, and recommending products. In addition, payment processors and credit card companies are embedding payment services to secure their position in agentic commerce.