ai commerce

Millions of small businesses are stepping into a new kind of storefront, one that lives inside conversations rather than on a traditional product grid. Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts are designed to let merchants surface products directly in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, and the...

Shopify’s insistence that “LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s checkout” was not a throwaway line; it was the framing of an argument that the company is trying to win as AI turns conversational interfaces into a mainstream shopping surface. On its Q4 2025 earnings call, Shopify executives described the...

Shopify and Google’s joint push around a new open standard — the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) — and Shopify’s concurrent rollout of Agentic Storefronts and an expanded Shopify Catalog mark a decisive moment in the evolution of conversational commerce. The announcements position UCP as the...

OpenAI’s new Instant Checkout is moving from experiment to scale: after launching with U.S. Etsy sellers, the feature will soon enable in-chat purchases from more than one million Shopify merchants, a step that crystallizes a shift from “links to actions” in e-commerce and creates a new...

Google’s advertising leaders have quietly drawn a clear line: Gemini the assistant stays ad‑free for now, even as Google races to fold advertising into other AI experiences where commercial intent is clearer and measurement is less fraught. Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of global ads, told...

Alibaba’s consumer Qwen chat has quietly graduated from “research demo” to a transaction‑enabled assistant, and at the same moment the Wikimedia Foundation is re‑casting Wikipedia as a paid data partner for major AI labs — two linked developments that reveal how generative AI is evolving from...

Microsoft’s new retailer playbook isn’t theory — it’s a practical roadmap that tells merchants exactly how and why their products can vanish from AI recommendations if catalogs, structured data, and live site experiences aren’t ready for conversational and agentic commerce. The guide, published...

PayPal and Microsoft have quietly collapsed discovery, decision and payment into a single conversational lane: Copilot Checkout lets U.S. shoppers find products, open a branded in‑chat checkout, and complete payment without leaving the Copilot interface — with PayPal powering inventory...

Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) has announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to build a cloud‑native, AI‑enabled unified data platform intended to accelerate transmission planning, improve real‑time situational awareness, and help the Midwest grid absorb surging...

Google’s move to codify shopping for the AI era arrived at NRF as the Universal Commerce Protocol — an open, modular specification designed to let conversational agents discover products, assemble carts, apply contextual offers, and complete tokenized checkouts without bespoke integrations for...

Google has unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed to let AI agents carry a customer from discovery through checkout and post‑purchase support without stitching together bespoke integrations for every assistant and merchant. Background The last 18 months have...

Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout launch and a high-profile insider sale at Etsy have collided in recent days to produce a new, more complex narrative about Etsy’s place in an evolving AI-driven commerce ecosystem—one that shifts questions from pure product differentiation to distribution, merchant...

Shopify’s new Agentic Storefronts and the co‑developed Universal Commerce Protocol mark a decisive step toward making AI assistants not just discovery surfaces but full shopping environments — letting Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT and other agents find, present and complete...