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11 results for "shopping"
AI agents capable of searching, comparing, and completing purchases autonomously have entered the retail funnel in 2026, with McKinsey projecting up to $1 trillion in US retail impact by 2030.
With 20% of consumers interested in AI shopping agents, major retailers are blocking access, leaning into dynamic pricing, and building proprietary tools — all to resist the price transparency that consumer AI shopping tools create.
Nine in ten retailers plan to grow their AI budgets in 2026, with agentic AI the fastest-growing deployment category — but more than half of consumers still describe shopping experiences as generic.
Amazon's AI shopping assistant Rufus has crossed 250 million users — and sellers who haven't adapted for AI-powered discovery face a structural disadvantage heading into Prime Day 2026.
68% of consumers used AI-enabled shopping tools in the past three months. Amazon and Walmart are racing to control the AI interface — the decision layer — that mediates every purchase those consumers make.
68% of consumers used at least one AI shopping tool in the past 90 days — but retailers are still optimizing for search engines, not for the AI agents increasingly acting as consumer proxies.
Amazon is licensing Alexa for Shopping technology to competing retailers via a new AWS product, with Kate Spade the first customer using an AI gift concierge built on Anthropic's Claude Haiku.
Google released an open standard for AI agents to browse and buy across retailer inventory — a structural bid to become the connective layer of agentic commerce.
Almost every retailer is building toward AI-powered agentic commerce. Only half of consumers are comfortable with autonomous purchasing agents. That gap is retail's defining challenge in 2026.
Canadian Tire, Walmart, and other major retailers are restructuring product descriptions and metadata to be parsed by AI shopping agents — the traditional SEO playbook is becoming obsolete.
Adobe Digital Insights data shows AI-driven visits to U.S. retail sites surged 393% year-over-year in Q1 2026, with AI-referred shoppers converting 42% better — marking the emergence of agentic commerce at scale.