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."

"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."

Autonomous AI agents now perform whole shopping workflows, handling research, evaluation, selection, and purchase on behalf of consumers. Agent-to-agent commerce connects consumers' shopping agents with vendor systems to enable fully automated transactions. Retail platforms are introducing features that execute purchases without direct human input, and generative models are scanning vendor sites to compare and recommend products. Payment processors and credit card firms are integrating payment services into these agentic flows to capture transaction routing and authorization. The convergence of recommendation, procurement, and embedded payments is shifting retail interactions from people-to-systems toward system-to-system commerce.

Read at Harvard Business Review