AI Agents Are Shopping for Your Customers: Are You Ready?

Back from NRF in New York this January, and it reminded me of something. I remember when mobile shopping felt optional. Then suddenly it was 60% of your traffic and the conversation was over.

AI commerce is hitting that same inflection point right now, with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Amazon all fighting for your customer’s wallet. This is the buy-side of the shift I keep writing about in AI agents for marketing: the agents aren’t just answering questions anymore. They’re getting ready to check out.

The number that got my attention: AI-driven traffic to retail sites jumped 693% during the 2025 holiday season (Adobe).

Google and Shopify recently announced a new way for products to get discovered and purchased. It’s called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), and here’s why it matters even if you don’t do ecommerce.

(Video: AI Agents Are Shopping for Your Customers (Google & Shopify Just Changed Commerce), MarketingAlec on YouTube)

What is UCP?

Think of it as the API layer that lets AI assistants actually buy stuff, not just point at it.

Here’s the flow:

Discover. AI finds your products through standardized product data.
Transact. The customer completes the purchase inside the AI interface.
Support. Order tracking and returns flow back through the same channel.

No redirects. No friction. I watched a Google demo at NRF where you asked for a basket of products for a party, and every time you added or removed something, the image regenerated on the fly courtesy of nano-banana (Google’s image model). The part that stuck with me was checkout. When you went to buy, it purchased every product in the basket in a single transaction.

Who’s backing it: Target, Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Shopify, Amex, and 20-plus other industry heavyweights. This is not vaporware. (One sanity check before you quote it to your board: the backer list and the “open standard” claim are moving fast, so confirm the current roster before you build a deck around it.)

Download the UCP Checklist

Why it matters for your brand

1. High-intent visibility. Your products can show up in Google AI Mode and Gemini at the exact moment a customer is ready to buy. One integration, multiple AI platforms.

2. Zero checkout friction. The AI handles cart, discounts, and payment using the customer’s saved info. Real-time inventory means you sidestep the “sorry, out of stock” abandonment problem.

3. You keep control. This is the part that surprised people in the room:

You stay the merchant of record.
Your pricing rules apply.
Your data stays yours.
No platform lock-in, because it’s an open standard.

A lot of folks are going to sit on this and wait to see whether ChatGPT and its checkout play with Stripe catch up. I get the instinct. But get on the waitlist and start testing anyway. This one is genuinely complicated, and it’s going to take real tweaking to get it right for your brand. Better to be tweaking now than starting from zero when your category is already wired in.

The brands visible to AI agents will win the next round. The ones who aren’t will be left wondering where their traffic went. If you want the wider view of where this fits across your whole stack, that’s the AI marketing map.

Cheers, Alec

P.S. If that wasn’t enough to plan around, remember that ads are coming to the free plans in ChatGPT. The shopping layer and the ad layer are arriving together, which tells you exactly how serious the platforms are about owning the purchase.

Get ahead of the agentic-commerce shift

AI agents are about to do your customers’ shopping for them, and the brands wired into that flow first are the ones who’ll own their categories. Every Friday I break down the protocols, the platform moves, and the setup steps worth taking before your competitors do. Want the agentic-commerce playbook while there’s still a head start in it?

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