Leaders from Amex, Google and Walmart say AI shopping helpers are changing how stores get found, though most shoppers still want their favorite brands.
AI shopping helpers are changing how stores reach customers, according to executives from American Express, Google and Walmart. They spoke on a panel at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. The big finding: even when AI does the shopping, 75% of consumers still want to buy from their preferred store, Amex says.
This new style of shopping is called agentic commerce. An AI agent sits between the customer and the store and acts on the customer's behalf. Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting, said it upends the current model that drives all shoppers back to the merchant website. Some merchants are still working out how to stay visible and keep a connection with their customers.
Margaret Ryan, who heads product at Amex Digital Labs, said AI will increasingly decide which brands show up and are presented to a customer. Businesses need to be discoverable, she said, and the AI needs to know what value they offer.
Stores link their product lists to AI agents through model context protocols. That is an open standard for connecting AI agents to outside data. It lets the AI find a specific item when someone asks for it. Ryan added that Amex also wants its cards to show up in these new shopping journeys.
Lisa Yokoyama, a product director at Google, said people use chat-style AI to go deeper. Their questions are longer and more precise. They also do more research, which makes it easier to compare products.
Brands still matter, though. Ryan said the 75% preference goes beyond brand loyalty. It is also about the value a store gives, such as loyalty points, credit card rewards or a personalized offer.
Trent Addington, Walmart's vice president of payment acceptance, said AI is meant to make shopping simpler, not remove the human. He sees a chance for more personal service. He called the moment of payment the most personal part of the shopping trip and said customers expect stores to get it right every time. In his view, payments will likely decide whether people trust this new channel.
If you sell products, make them easy for AI helpers to find and describe, because shoppers still want to buy from brands they know.
Mastercard describes AI tools that could buy things for you, and says trust is the hard part: who gets to spend your money, and under what rules.
Read more: Mastercard outlines how AI assistants could shop and pay for youWorld models, AI that learns physics from video, are being built into home robots and driverless cars, and your own videos may help train them.
Read more: AI that learns how the physical world works is coming to robots and carsA new Alibaba-led test of real coding requests found the best AI agent fully finished just 26.4 percent of tasks, so human review still matters.
Read more: AI coding helpers fully finish only about 1 in 4 real tasks
