This was the Agentic Commerce Black Friday. Adobe and Salesforce tracked the numbers: - Total spend: $11.8B (Adobe) $18B (Salesforce) - AI-influenced share: 17-25% of all sales - Year-over-year AI traffic growth: 805% Most merchants aren't ready for this shift. At all.

Research before a purchase removes a lot of the pain of research and improve conversion Where it's happening isn't just ChatGPT, there's a mix - Amazon's Rufus. - Walmart's Sparky. - ChatGPT with shopping plugins. And ChatGPT prompts you to turn on "shopping research" when you log in.

MRC says 1 in 3 merchants aren't even thinking about LLMs 🤯 That's wild. When the data says everything is already shifting. And AI is influencing purchase behavior. You can't ignore this.

For decades, retail optimized for human psychology. - Store layouts designed to slow you down. - Checkout flows designed to reduce friction. - Visual merchandising designed to trigger impulse.

AI agents don't care about any of that. - They parse structured product data. - Compare prices ruthlessly. - Don't get seduced by lifestyle photography.

There are three implications: 1. SEO becomes AEO. Agent Engine Optimization. - An LLM needs to read your SKU data 2. The storefront moves to the chat window. - Whoever integrates inventory into LLM interfaces captures the conversion. 3. Fraud teams face a paradox. - They spent years building systems to block bots. - Now they need to welcome the right bots while blocking the wrong ones.

If 1 in 5 sales now come through AI intermediaries, are you building for humans or machines? The answer is increasingly: yes.