Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 9/21-9/26 (week 39/52)
We have a FIRST LOOK at ChatGPT Pulse (and does it have a shopping angle?), Dr. Cian is back, New Consumer GenAI Datapoints, and VCs Pour Capital into Companies Seeking to Set Standards
Before we jump into all the action from this week, next week Derek and I will be at Groceryshop in Las Vegas - let me know if you are there and want to talk Agentic Commerce! We’re on the main stage early Monday fighting it out in the Shark Reef with 11 other startups, I’ll report back next week how we did.🤞
FIRST LOOK: ChatGPT Pulse
The biggest news this week started when Sam Altman teased something coming with this X post→
Long-time readers will know what I was thinking (ChatGPT Checkout!?), but alas, instead we saw the birth of ChatGPT Pulse, which was also saw Fidji Simo’s first X post (and a new-to-me substack to go along!) announcing a big new consumer feature for ChatGPT in her new role as CEO of Applications:
The substack is here if you want to sub btw→
What’s ChatGPT Pulse?
Think of Pulse as your morning curated and personalized search engine, newspaper, and brainstorming partner and, maybe soon, shopping assistant?
Pulse is very GPU intensive and, thus, in this early experience phase is only available to limited users on the mobile app that have ChatGPT Pro. Turns out, guess who woke up this morning and had access - yep your’s truly! Let’s go through it together…
Welcome to Pulse→
You’re greeted with this little welcome screen and a really nice touch is if you look at the little icons in there, they are actually a real preview of what Pulse prepared for me that, not unlike product cards, come out in what I’m going to call Pulse Cards,
This first Pulse Card was quite a surprise, I was expecting weather or something kind of light and fluffy and here Pulse is hitting me with some ideas on how to position my startup and suggests we punch up on “Catalog as the Center of Gravity”. This is 🤯 because while I’ve brainstormed some things with ChatGPT about press releases and some ideas around wording, I didn’t realized it had pulled together such a deep understanding. I won’t show you behind the card, because, well it’s ideas are really really good and insightful.
Ok, let’s chalk the first one up to luck, here’s number 2:
Umm, Ok, this is actually pretty good and eerily accurate to some things we do in our product that I’m 98% sure I haven’t ever told ChatGPT about, but it’s an educated guess, I’m sure the next Pulse Card will be less on the nose…
Alright, I think it pulled the readiness score from our press release, but we’ve never used PDP Scorecards, I kind of like that…. But these first three are kind of riffing on things we have out there, nothings really novel…
This one is kind of crazy, because I haven’t seen an article ever on this topic, but reading behind the card, what ChatGPT is speculating about how search, and even ad systems could work in agentic is pretty far out there and I read a LOT about this stuff.
Where’s shopping? …let’s ask!
One Pulse Card I hoped to see was something around products. As you can imagine I search for a ton of products on ChatGPT on any given day, but there aren’t any Pulse Product Cards in my feed. I asked ChatGPT about it and it said, not today, but…
And look at that it comes up with a great example.
Along the way in the feature you can thumbs up/down things and there’s a curate button where you can tweak things or have a convo with ChatGPT on the topic. You can add a more newsy approach with the ‘Keep me updated on’ which could be a company you are tracking, or a topic, etc.
I’d Rate ChatGPT Pulse a….
I have to say, this feature not only exceeded my expectations, it blew them away. The depth of the content it pulled up was simultaneously helpful, thought provoking, intellectually challenging, but also made me scratch my head - how does it know so much about what is top of mind with me? I rate this one an A+.
When they come out with a Shopping Card on this, I think everyone in the Retail world is going to be very surprised about how good ChatGPT is at cross-internet product recommendations. It will be simultaneously mind blowingly good, extremely scary, but also very exciting. I say ‘very exciting’, because every day it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that GenAI is going to really accelerate the growth rate and adoption of e-commerce.
That’s actually a great transition to topic 2…
Dan Frommer New Consumer Behavior Mega Deck
In retail and CPG, Dan Frommer, is one of the top minds in reading the tea leaves to decode what’s going on with consumers. This week he published a new regular report he puts out called, “The New Consumer: Consumer Trends Report”. The entire PDF is below, but here’s three slides that caught my attention. Dan presents the data in a ‘top-down’ fashion so I’ll stick to that.
At the top of the funnel, GenAI has 98% awareness. You can’t really get too much better than that. Dan points out that GenAI’s awareness is greater than top brands like Doritos, TikTok and Viagra:
Digging into ChatGPT, Dan has access to credit card receipt data that shows how many US consumers are paying for ChatGPT. This is growing 168% y/y. The ChatGPT freemium model is cooking 🧑🍳. Consumers try the free version, love the experience, but hit prompt limits, or want access to better models and features and pull out their credit cards 💵
Finally, Dan gives a great gift with some interesting demographic data as it relates to Shopping. There’s plenty of data around demographics generally OR shopping, but GenAI demos AND shopping is very rare indeed:
While the topic is tied to meal planning and grocery, I think it’s as good a proxy as we’re going to get. As with any new technology, the younger generations are faster to adopt it and trust it and then the older generations come along. Not surprising but good to have a baseline here in Fall of 2025 to track how fast these cohorts pull together in behavior.
Friend of the Retailgentic Pod, Dr. Luca Cian - GenAI Turns Prime Day Into a Strategy Game (Agentic Discount Chicken?)
One of our more popular Podcasts was with the UVA Darden professor Luca Cian who shared his research around Agentic Commerce and trust with us on the pod (here if you missed it)
Well, good news, this week he’s out with a new article that covers two of my favorite topics: Amazon and Agentic Commerce. I don’t want to say more because it’s a good read - no spoilers!
TechRepublic: The Ultimate Guide to Agentic Commerce
Speaking of good reads, we’re at the phase of Agentic Commerce where we’re getting some pretty vague and high levels ‘all about’ type articles. As I started reading this one from TechRepublic, I was a little skeptical because most of them are super-thin on details. Well, TechRepublic crushed it on this one!
It’s really a good general overview and does a great job of going both wide on and deep enough that you get a good feel for the ‘lay of the land’ in where we are today.
At the end, I especially liked that it ‘lands the plane’ with some great tactical and strategic advice for retailers and brands and Step 1 is 100% a winner. In fact the Product Catalog is the New Center of Gravity and has gone from an overlooked spreadsheet to the hero of Agentic Commerce! (see what I did there? 😉)
Battle of the Competing Agentic standards and protocols
About once a month since I started, a new payment protocol, or authorization or Agent-to-agent standard has come out. This week it came to a bit of a frenzy.
Who Will build the Agentic Rails?
It started with this great piece by my long-time buddy, Alistair Barr, who always has great insights into various technology trends:
Circuit and Chisel Raises ~$20m
Then two folks that spun out of Stripe raised $19.2m for an agentic payment protocol called ATXP in a company they call Circuit and Chisel (I dig that, creates a cool visual when you hear it).
Senpi
THEN, Jason Goldberg (the ‘founder of Fab.com’ Jason Goldberg, not MY Jason Goldberg - aka Retailgeek), announced that his company, Senpi, had raised $4m in a seed round for an Agentic Wallet/Crypto type thing (I’m sure there’s a protocol in there somewhere).
Swap -
Then this global trade/tax company, called Swap Global, announced, yep you guessed it, they have an Agentic Infrastructure too
That has to be it, what are we up to 3 in one week? Wait, I’m getting something, ok, we have another one…
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, ironically the firm that is out there, by default blocking all the Agentic agents, now has come out with a stablecoin called NET Dollar, that is a new currency for agentic transactions. Hmmm, I wonder if an agent uses NET Dollar, will it magically get through the filters?
That’s a Wrap…until next week.
Sadly, when we started writing our three part series on GEO for retailers (starts here if you missed it), we didn’t know that we’d be invited to Groceryshop, so we’re going to have delay that a week. Never fear, we’ll cover any breaking news, have a recap from Groceryshop and, of course, we have an awesome podcast for you this Thursday.
BONUS!
If you made it this far, your surpsie bonus is a little light reading. This week I discovered, (but it was published last week), a DeepMind paper called “Virtual Agent Economies”. I love agents, especially when they are virtual and I love Economics and Economies, so sign me up!
I’m about 25% through it and, well, it’s pretty dense, but fascinating and relatively approachable. The sandbox part was a little scary, but I got out of that and we’re back into the fun stuff. Enjoy!