Agentic Shopping News and Good Reads for the Week of 7/6-7/12 (week 28/52)

First shot fired in the browser wars, agentic alliances, CloudFlare checkmate, higher-grounding, and we found the missing $8T... What a crazy week in Agentic Commerce!

In 5 years when we look back at 2025, July will stand out as the start of the Agentic browser wars. That was the big news, but there was a lot of other really interesting news items and articles, let’s dig in!

July 9, 2025: The Agentic Browser Wars have Begun!

Perplexity fires the first shot with Comet

We’ve been on pins and needles here at Retailgentic HQ waiting for the first mainstream Agentic browser to drop. Yes there have been some others take a shot like Opera (Neon), Sigma AI, Brave and The Browser Company (Dia). We’ve tried them all and they weren’t earth shattering. Thanks to Perplexity’s CEO dropping hints on X of what the browser was capable of, we had a feeling this would be different, and it is!

We’ve been playing with Comet since Wed July 9th and wow, it has no disappointed, in fact we got the cherry on top - to steal some of the buzz, OpenAI let it slip to Reuters that they are coming out with an agentic browser too!

Couple of early observations

Comet does add some amazing new commerce use cases that I would call more a step above ‘Research/Find/Buy’ and more a super agentic shopping assistant.

I’m so focused on Agentic Commerce, the **BIGGEST** surprise is the email/calendar and more mundane tasks leap in optimization. By Friday after 2 days of use, I gained 30-60 minutes back in my day. Comet gave me a very fast 10%+ productitivity boost.

Want to see what I mean by super-agentic shopping assistant, well good news…

Join our Perplexity Comet Live Demo !

There’s so much to go over and the static nature of a post or even a produced video doesn’t give Comet justice, so we’re going to start our coverage with a live walk-through. It will be ~30mins before Q+A and is Tuesday July 15, 2pm ET.

You can join us on:

• Linkedin: here

• YouTube: here

• X: here

This is a great time to subscribe to all those channels so you don’t miss any RetailAgentic content!

Aravind’s (Perplexity CEO) talk at Y Combinator

Right on queue, Aravind appeared at YC event and spent a good part of the talk on Comet - he calls it a cognitive browser or os or cloud. Once you live 3-5 days with it, you’ll understand (did I mention we’re doing a demo on Tuesday?)

ChatGPT spills the Agentic Browser Beans

One of the pages in Sam Altman’s playbook is to try and disrupt competing announcements by front-running them, or stealing the news cycle. While their sources aren’t named, someone (mystery!) let it slip to Reuters they have a browser coming out soon, here’s the highlights of what was revealed:

• This leaked on July 9, totally 100% a coincidence 😉 that it was the same day as Perplexity’s big launch. (Founder note: if I were Aravind, I’d be very happy by this as it shows you are living rent free in their heads and are 100% in the arena and over the target).

• ChatGPT Agentic Browser is “weeks away” - I saw speculation that it will ship by end of July and also that it will crop with ChatGPT which is supposed to be very close/this summer.

• You will switch seamlessly between a ChatGPT interface and the browser (Comet has the ‘Comet Assistant’ in a ‘side-pop’ bar that takes about 25% of the screen leaving the majority for the browser).

• OpenAI poached 2 of the OG Chrome developers from Google for the project

• Like almost all new browsers, it’s derived from the open-source Chromium that Google’s Chrome is built on.

Why do the Browser Wars Matter to Agentic Commerce?

You’ll see this in the demo, but for our internet-fueled world, the browser is basically the operating system. As Star Wars teaches us, you want the high-ground and in Agentic AI, the browser is 100% the high ground.

This actually came up in this week’s All-In Pod (about 46 mins in)→

I’m going to have to disagree with Chamath on his take - I think what Perplexity has done here was not only clever, but essential, they were weeks away from losing the high ground, and at least now they are on the same level and have a fighting chance. His point on distribution is a real one. After 3 days on Comet thought, I can tell you, like my move from Google search to Perplexity, I’m not going back to Chrome. Now it’s a battle between Perplexity and whatever the ChatGPT agentic browser is - given some of the turmoil over at OpenAI (Meta poached some top talen, their Windsurf deal blew up, there was IO controversy), maybe Perplexity has more of a lead than you would think.

..and commerce?

Oh yeah, for commerce, here’s why this matter:

1. (This is number #1 because it’s HUGE!) Agentic Browsers makes agentic commerce unblockable - this is kind of complicated, so just go with it for now, I’ll put out a longer post explaining this and we’ll talk about it Tues. Cloudflare’s attempts to block bots is DOA.

2. In my browser I have all my commerce context - order history across every ecommerce site I use. I have login information and my email is always open. LLMs crave content, context and authority and context and context. The brower gives agents the ‘context high-ground’.

3. Thanks to the prominence of autofill, consumers are totally used to a browser saying- hey you are about to login or buy something - want me to just fill that in for you? YES! By being at the browser-level, Agentic Shopping Agents solve the payment problem via autofill which is an existing and trusted standard and use case.

4. Guess where we use browsers? On our desktops, mobile devices, I just used one on my Alexa show, my TV, my car. kiosks, airport signs, everywhere. I have more browsers on more devices than AI chatbots. When comet comes out on iOS, I’ll be showing mini-safari the door.

Stay tuned!

Sitting here at July, the big date I think about in commerce-land is Halloween. I think we’ll see these browers iterate to v2 or v3 just in time for holiday (commerce isn’t ready or used to AI speed yet) and their usage (you saw the Prime day stats) growth and absolute % is going to be startling to folks sleeping on Agentic Commerce. We’ll be tracking all of this very closely for the next 4 months and beyond.

An Agentic commerce Alliance is announced…

Shopware, an open source ecommerce platform (think of it as a next-gen Magento) European company announced an Agentic Commerce Alliance. Details here. Sadly, we weren’t invited to join 😢.

Agentic AI: The Biggest Retail Disruption Since Ecommerce!? (I Agree 💯)

Over in Total Retail (targets Retail execs), there’s a great article by Sam Panzer where he lays out a compelling argument that Agentic Commerce is going to be as big, if not bigger than ecommerce.

Agentic Shopping needs, umm, lots of improvement on Laptops

Grocery and Gifting Agentic AI Startups Come out of Stealth Mode

While we tend to cover the big name-brand ‘horizontal’ AI companies, there’s a Cambrian explosion of vertically focused Agentic AI startups. There are so many we haven’t been able to track them all. There were two that came out of stealth we noticed because they feature ecommerce veterans in our network:

Agentic Grocery Shopping: Delectable

Delecatable came out of stealth here.

Agentic Gifting: Generous

You may hear a bit more about this one this week 😉, but I’m also intrigued by. You can check out their de-stealthed site here. Are you working on a Agentic Commerce company either directly in commerce or payments? We want to chat? email us via contact@refibuy.ai

Fast Company: Beauty brands that Embrace Agentic AI will Succeed (I Agree 💯)

Speaking of verticals and Agentic shopping, Fast Company has a great article that is alerting the beauty category to wake up to Agentic.

Here’s a great quote:

This is not just the next trend—it’s a paradigm shift. The brands that embrace agentic AI now will be best positioned to lead a new era of intelligent retail, where deep personalization, economic efficiency, and brand trust converge. Just as the past decade redefined where and how we shop, the next will redefine what helps us shop. And that helper, increasingly, will be agentic AI.

We Found the Missing $9T!

As you can guess, around ReFiBuy HQ we read a LOT of content about AI generally and Agentic Commerce especially. I keep running into this datapoint that predicts Agentic Commerce will be $9T by 2030, but could never find the source until now. It’s from Ark Invest (Cathie Wood’s investment vehicle). Here’s the table that spits out that $9T number:

And details are here. What’s kind of mindblowing is this is from October 2024, so Ark was very early. If I had seen this 10/24 I would have spit my drink out and laughed. Today, I’m going 🤔….yeah I can see it…

Until Next Weekend (or Tuesday)!

That’s a wrap on the best Agentic Commerce nuggets we saw this week, we’ll be back with another recap next week, until then, see you Tuesday! 👋