But when this fully autonomous tech does exist, one of its biggest applications is expected to be online shopping on consumers’ behalf. For the tech companies that host these end-to-end AI purchase journeys, there’s a lot of money to be made via new in-chat advertising models and through hosting in-platform transactions.
It’s no surprise, then, that Google, OpenAI and Perplexity are racing against each other to release new shopping-focused features for their AI chatbots to prep for when these agents do arrive. This week, Google became the latest to announce an integrated checkout within its AI Mode, following moves from Perplexity and OpenAI in late 2025. The big common thread in all these AI platform announcements has been a partnership with Shopify.
As consumers increasingly turn to AI search for shopping, tech and marketing teams have been scrambling to relaunch their brands’ DTC websites and optimize their product description pages according to the emerging practice of AIO (AI optimization). Anecdotally, Finkelstein says that in the last few months, Shopify has seen more legacy brands migrate onto the platform than it has in five years. This paradigm shift will also change how brands are discovered online, with implications for advertising budgets and how they’re spent across platforms like Google and Meta.
Shopify, for its part, helped to facilitate retail’s direct-to-consumer brand boom, making it cheaper and easier for anyone to open an online store. Now, Finkelstein sees its role as bolstering the era of AI shopping. “They’re realizing that it’s not like where you can say you don’t do social commerce. You can’t really say you don’t do AI,” Finkelstein predicts. “You need to work with a partner that’s laying these rails for agentic AI, because you cannot opt out of this.”
Merit-based brand equity over pay-to-play
Alongside the launch of this new agentic commerce UCP with Shopify, Google also became the first major AI platform to introduce advertising within AI chat this week, via a pilot of personalized “direct offers” that brands and advertisers can set up for shoppers within Google’s AI Mode. It also announced a new feature that will allow brands to integrate a branded “business agent” within Google’s AI search. The feature, which is already being used by retailers including Poshmark and Reebok, helps brands customize how shoppers’ product questions are answered in their brand voices.
This follows Amazon’s introduction of sponsored prompts in its AI assistant Rufus in late 2025, where brands can bid on follow-up questions within consumers’ AI conversations as they shop. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI is reportedly testing different in-chat advertising models that CEO Sam Altman has promised will be “thoughtful and tasteful”, but the startup is having to build all this from scratch, where Google and Amazon have well-established ads consoles.
“People will expect when they talk to an AI answer engine that they get what the AI “agent” feels is the best product for them personally. They won’t want to see an ad, so brands will most likely need to prompt people to consider their unique qualities in follow-up prompts they can pay for,” says Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI. “There’s such a lack of understanding within luxury brands of how all this tech works right now, so giving them these ready-made products through platforms like Shopify to plug and play works well.”
