Within 5 years, AI agents will reshape the e-commerce landscape and become the main channel for product discovery.

Within 5 years, AI agents will reshape the e-commerce landscape and become the main channel for product discovery.

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Author: Long Yue

Source: Hard AI

AI agents are reshaping the landscape of e-commerce.

According to a recent report by Citi, a wave of "Agentic Commerce" driven by AI is on the rise. This will not only change the way users shop, but will also reshape the competitive landscape and value chain of e-commerce as a whole. The report predicts that AI agents will become the primary channel for user "product discovery" within five years, and that 2026 could be the tipping point for its market penetration.

More Than “One-Click Ordering”

According to Citi's report, agentic commerce is much more than enabling an AI assistant to complete transactions. Its core is to cover the entire shopping process, from "discovery" and "research" to "purchase." AI agents can assist users at every stage, with the ultimate goal of representing users to autonomously complete purchases according to preset criteria.

The report cites experts Jason Goldberg and Scot Wingo, who believe this is the first major innovation in e-commerce in over a decade. Currently, OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout,” Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, and Google’s integrated Gemini shopping tool are all just early prototypes of this transformation.

Is the 2026 Tipping Point Approaching?

Currently, product discovery is mainly controlled by Google, Amazon, and social platforms like Meta and TikTok. But experts cited in the Citi report predict that within five years, AI agents will become the main driver of product discovery.

The speed of this transformation could be astonishing. Expert Scot Wingo predicts that in the 2025 holiday shopping season, agentic commerce penetration could reach 20%. Jason Goldberg is even bolder, predicting this figure could reach 50% by 2026.

This view is supported by a recent survey from Epsilon, which shows that 23% of consumers plan to use AI/chatbots for shopping this holiday season, with that figure rising to 44% among Gen Z.

Giants at War

The core battlefield of this transformation is “Owning the Glass,” that is, control over apps, browsers, and operating systems. Major giants have already begun to deploy their strategies:

  • Amazon: The report points out that Amazon is currently taking a “walled garden” approach, blocking AI agents from scraping its website data to protect its core review and content assets. The report believes that agentic commerce is not a “threat to Amazon’s survival”. Its strong logistics system, Prime membership base, and catalog of over 1 billion products form a solid moat.
  • Google: The report believes Google’s moat in e-commerce remains solid. Its advantages include the Gemini large model, the Shopping Graph product directory with more than 50 billion listings, and a leading position in product discovery. By integrating Gemini into the Chrome browser and introducing A2A & AP2 agent protocols, Google is actively responding to competition.
  • OpenAI & Walmart: OpenAI, leveraging its over 800 million weekly active users (WAU) and partnerships with Etsy, Shopify, and Walmart, has gained a first-mover advantage. Walmart sees its cooperation with OpenAI as a major move to acquire incremental sales channels and challenge Amazon’s dominance. Although OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout” currently only supports single-item transactions, the report expects multi-cart functionality to launch soon.

The Rules of the Game May Be Rewritten

The rise of agentic commerce will profoundly impact the online advertising ecosystem. The report emphasizes that traditional search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving toward Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO). As AI agents participate more in decision-making, advertising budgets will shift from downstream conversion to upstream “brand discovery.”

This means that the importance of brands will not decrease, but increase. In AI-automated shopping decisions, strong brand awareness will become a key factor influencing AI recommendations and user choices.

For investors, this means a need to reassess the value of companies with strong brand assets in the future e-commerce ecosystem.

 

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hard AI". For more AI frontier information, click here.

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