ai shopping

Debenhams’ move to let customers discover, receive personalised recommendations and complete purchases entirely inside the PayPal app marks a clear inflection point: a major UK retail group has co‑developed an agentic shopping experience with a payments platform that now wants to be a shopping...

Retailers are rushing to put their merchandise into the hands of AI agents — and in doing so they’re trading direct consumer relationships, deep behavioral data, and parts of the customer experience for convenience, reach and the promise of a new discovery channel. Background: the quick pivot to...

The era when search engines merely influenced shopping is giving way to one where AI agents can complete purchases on a shopper’s behalf — and recent moves by JD Sports, Google, Shopify, Microsoft and others make that shift unavoidably practical rather than hypothetical. JD’s decision to let...

PayPal’s announced agreement to acquire Tel Aviv‑based Cymbio marks a decisive step in the race to own the operational plumbing of agentic commerce—the emerging set of AI‑driven shopping surfaces where assistants discover, compare and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. The deal...

Shopify and Google’s announcement of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) marks a decisive step toward a world where AI agents not only recommend products but complete purchases, manage subscriptions, and handle post‑purchase support — all inside conversational interfaces. For small businesses...

Algolia’s new partnership with Microsoft signals a decisive shift in how product data will power the next generation of AI-native shopping — moving real-time, retailer-approved attributes (pricing, inventory, enriched metadata) into agentic surfaces like Copilot, Bing Shopping, and Edge so...

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...