Business Insights: Global Markets, Strategy & Economic Trends
- AI agent-driven commerce: redesign customer journeys, fulfillment, and governance to support seamless autonomous purchasing.
- Emphasize open protocols and agent-readable storefronts to ensure interoperability and future-proof integrations.
- Harden security, payments, and B2B strategies; build partnerships and compliance to capture agent-mediated transactional flows.
In April 2025, Amazon launched “Buy for Me,” which lets its AI agent visit brand websites, select products, enter payment details, and complete purchases without the customer ever leaving the Amazon app. By September, OpenAI had introduced “Instant Checkout” with the open-source Agentic Commerce Protocol, enabling purchases directly inside ChatGPT. In January 2026, Google unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference: an open standard, built with Shopify, Target, Walmart, and more than 20 other partners, covering the shopping process from discovery to post-purchase support. Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout at the same conference, and Shopify has since switched on agent-readable storefronts by default across millions of merchants. Gartner now projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchases, more than $15 trillion, will flow through AI agent exchanges.
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