Agentic Commerce News for the Week of 11/9-11/15 (Week 46/52): Interesting Altman Interview and A Great Mega Deck 🤘

Sam riffs on Amazon and ads - we ponder: Is Sam after Jeff's Margin? And we highlight the top slides from a 250 slide monster deck that is awesome-sauce

Only 13 days till Black Friday! 😱📈

This week in Retailgentic we had:

• Adobe dropped some great October Agentic data (1,200% y/y traffic and conversions +16% from Agentic commerce sites) , we covered here.

• Tuesday we had a payments pod with Johnathan McGowan, CEO and co-founder of PayOS here.

• Thursday the big Google news broke here.

This week outside the headlines I want focus on two interesting pieces that came out: A fresh Sam Altman interview and a great deck that has a strong presentation of data we’ve covered previously that is topical to Agentic Commerce.

Sam Altman + Tyler Cowen Interview

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason university and he has a pod and a confab that Altman spoke at. It’s a pretty good interview with a lot of ground covered and questions asked of Sam I haven’t heard before. The whole thing is here and is a good 54mins:

There are two points relevant to our Agentic Commerce Topic: Amazon and Ads, let’s dig in!

They both start at 18:02. Here’s the transcript for the first: (bolding is mine):

Tyler: “Now you have a deal in the works with Walmart that people can use GPT, ask questions — what should I buy at Walmart — and then they can buy it at Walmart, and you and Walmart have some arrangement.”

Tyler: “Do you think Amazon will fold and join that or are they going to fight back and try to do their own thing?”

Altman: “I have no idea. If I were them I would fight back.”

Tyler: “You would fight back?”

Altman: “I think so. Yeah.”

No, Your Margin is MY Opportunity

If you recall when Instant Checkout launched and had a significantly lower take rate than Amazon (3-5% vs. ~15%), no ads and merchant-of-record, I thought the baller move would be to try an peel those marketplace people off the Amazon platform and onto ChatGPT via a targeted Shopify+OpenAI campaign.

I ‘heard’ these comments different than many - I think Altman is going to out-low-margin Amazon who invented the famous Bezos-ism: Your margin is my opportunity. Amazon’s fattest two high margin business are marketplace and ads. ChatGPT has an opportunity to take a chunk out of both.

When Altman says “If I were them I would fight back”, I think he is saying they won’t sell on ChatGPT, but they are going to have to lower their take rate? Supporting this is the conversation a bit earlier that’s started at 15:30

How do you interpret this?

Altman on Ads

Right after the Amazon statement

Tyler: “How important a revenue source will ads be for OpenAI?”

Altman: “Again, there’s a kind of ad that I think would be really bad like the one we talked about. There are kinds of ads that I think would be very good or pretty good to do. I expect it’s something we’ll try at some point. I do not think it is our biggest revenue opportunity.”

Tyler: “What will the ad look like on the page?”

Altman: “I have no idea. You asked like a question about productivity earlier. Yeah. I’m really good about not doing the things I don’t want to do.

Tyler: “And that’s something you don’t want to do?”

Altman: “You know, we have like the world expert thinking about our product strategy. I used to do that. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about product and now she’s much better at it than me. I have other things to think about. I’m sure she’ll figure it out.”

Couple things:

• When they refer to ads they talked about earlier (14:30 mark)- that’s sponsored listings and Google listings that are misaligned with the user’s intent.

• When Sam talks about world expert on product strategy - that’s Fidji.

There’s now three interviews (A16Z, Stratechery and Cowen) where Sam has said:

• Trust in ChatGPT is their biggest asset

• No sponsored listings or PLAs or 10 blue links - that will hurt that trust

• He wants ads that add value - maybe something targeted in discovery like instagram reels ads (feed-based, sora?)

• Maybe something like Instacart at the checkout (add 2 granola bars save $10) (Paging Fidji)

• Ads are not a top priority - they have much bigger revenue opportunities (the marketplace?)

Whenever I share these quotes, naysayers say: “Altman is lying they are going to have a system just like Amazon Ads”. Anything is possible, right now that is not his intent and I am fully on-board and 100% agree with ads ruining trust. Only time will tell, I’m predicting that Sam is going to hold the line here and as long as he is at OpenAI, we’re not going to see ads influence the product rank.

Six Key Slides From Activate Consulting’s “Technology and Media Outlook 2026 MEGA DECK

There’s nothing I love more than a fresh mega deck. A mega deck is a more than 50 slide presentation chock full of new data or ‘fresh takes’ on topics I follow (top 2 being ecommerce and GenAI/Agentic Commerce as you can imagine. Weighing in at a hefty 250 pages with 15 pages (slides 30-44) for AI and 12 pages (slides 45-56) for ecommerce this deck really delivers! That’s just 2 of the 15 chapters and I enjoyed them all. The second ‘chapter’ on this concept of ‘Online Super Users’ was an interesting perspective.

You can download the deck here and I highly recommend it. (Note: I am in no way affiliated with activate consulting and do not know of their work, just a fan of this deck).

Highlights

Here are Six Slides I found that were highlights and basically for those two sections and the intersection of what we cover here at Retailgentic the TL;DR→

Slide 31: Over 60% of US adults are now using GenAI Platforms

The data on the survey slides which I’ll call the ‘Activate Survey’ is from late 2025 and has a huge sample set at n=4004 which is very solid, usually we see 1000-2000, so this is a bigger than usual sample set.

here you can see in just a year monthly users grew 50%. We know from similarweb and other data that inside of that audience the frequency or ‘number of prompts’ is way up. I’m sure there’s a ton of Activate ‘Super Users’ in there really going at it.

Slide 32: Practically every US internet user will be a GenAI User

Activate Survey data. Two things about this. I like that it compares the current audience for GenAI which is only 3yrs old to Music, Video, social media and ecommerce. It’s not quite in the the zone with all of these but if it grows another 50% y/y it will be right there.

Note the writing on the left says that “the entire us online population will be a user by 2030. (I believe that’s up around 250m.

Slide 38: By delivering direct answers through AIO, Google is reducing click-through to sites

Source: Activate data and Similarweb

We’ve covered this data in many different formats. This one is clever because the down and to the right is enough to induce panic in the hearts of SEO and SEM people across the internet. My friend Joe pointed out that it is deceptive because 30% is zero on the Y axis, but regardless of that you can’t refute the slope of that line is scary. I am eager to see where the Q3 data comes out from Similarweb. At this pace, it looks like the next stop is 28% then 25% by end-of-yr.

Slide 44: GenAI platforms will pursue the full range of historical web monetization models

Nothing earth shattering here, just a nice presentaton of what we know with companie, screen shots and examples.

Slide 52: Based on our research, GenAI functionality will be used for each stage of the shopping process

Agentic Shopping naysayers love to say that people will really only use agentic for research or another set of them say the opposite- only to buy simple things. The Results of the Activate Survey:

• 60% want to use GenAI for the entire process - every step

• 69% Research

• 71% Find

• 63% Buy

And most likely this survey was done before ChatGPT checkout came out, so this data has a lot of room to run.

60% of 128m (slide 32) is: 76.8m GenAI users ready to buy products on Agentic Commerce - 🚀

My only note on this slide - should have been Research, Find, Buy!

Slide 53: Consumers will use generative AI primarily for discovery and research of lower consideration items

The category survey and observed data is all over the place and here (Activate Survey data) they are showing the top four categories (stated not observed) as:

• 44% - Groceries

• 41% - CSA

• 38% - Home

• 25% - Beauty/Personal care

Other surveys have it as CSA→Beauty→Home→Sporting Goods→other stuff→ Grocery as last. I’m not sure what to make of this yet.

That’s a Wrap and Next Week on Retailgentic…

That’s the exciting news for this week, I hope you enjoy the Altman video and definitely download that deck for some content to snack on over Thanksgiving if you need your fresh data fix.

Next week on Retailgentic, we start by digging into the dramatic increase in ChatGPTs revenue forecast and pontificate where that came from with a hopefully useful thought experiment. Then, as usual, we have a killer pod coming out Thursday. If you made it this far you earned a hint: it’s with a top executive at one of the biggest brands in the ecommerce platform space that is a public US company, that is not Shopify. 🤔 Good luck guessing, all will be revealed Thursday.

Happy Agentic Commercing!