Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 8/31-9/6 (week 36/52)
New Agentic startup framework, new vertical Agentic Commerce apps of note, Agentic payments and trust/authentication amongst agents.
This week the news cooperated nicely and was somewhat clustered into four buckets:
Agentic Commerce Startups
Vertical Agentic Commerce Agents
Agentic Payment News
Interesting Articles and News about Agentic Commerce Trust and Authenticiation
Those four categories are below and collect several news items per category.
New Agentic Commerce Startup Framework
The team at Citi Ventures has an article out this week walking through the background/trends that ‘setup up’ Agentic Commerce and then the introduced the first Market Map of the startups in the space that I’ve seen:
While I agree with the category and boxes, in my mental model, for retailers and brands its also helpful to know if the company’s solution is 'internal’, meaning behind or inside the website or ‘external’, meaning outside the website- e.g. dealing with one of the six Agentic Shopping Engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Grok.
Financial Times 🫶 Agentic Commerce
The Financial Times is at it again. They crashed onto the Agentic Commerce scene with their SCOOP covering the leak of ChatGPT’s forthcoming checkout. This week they had a piece that, like the Citi Ventures piece, has a good overview of the latest Agentic Commerce news (that you were way ahead on because you read Retailgentic) and some quotes from industry players. The article is here, but paywalled.
New Vertical Agentic Consumer Apps
There are two new articles this week introducing some interesting vertical consumer apps. There’s an explosion of new startups across many categories with fashion as the most popular. The two with the most buzz are Wizard (Marc Lore is an investor) and Daydeam, Julie Bornstein’s latest startup.
Here’s some of the ones I’m tracking. Generous was on the podcast, and we’re working on more.
This week there are two interesting articles on this topic:
Fashion Agentic Shopping Agent GENSMO Raises $60m
This article focused on fashion-focused Agents highlights startup Gensmo and also does a great job surveying all the other Agentic commerce startups in the category.
Flash.co - Price Shopping Agent
This week a new Agentic shopping startup launched called Flash. It’s a low price and research agent with a horizontal focus. Here’s an example. There’s an app and a web model they use. For the web if you find any URL of a product, take that URL and put ‘flash.co/’ in front of that URL, it scans the product page and uses that web data extraction to scan the product and according to the site they have over 4b datapoints (I assume this means SKUs). Here’s an example:
I took a Chewy URL for the VeggieDents my dogs like. It’s a great example case for Agent shopping because it has some complexity to it. It has variations and there are several products by the same company that are different (not chews) but for agents that use Google shopping and other existing pre-agentic systems that do poorly with complexity, it causes problems.
Here’s the initial display:
There are several features to Flash:
At the top, there’s a price/finder in the top section. It immediately shows some good savings where Chewy is $55.18 and PetMeds is $33.79 on this SKU with 19 more.
Then there’s an AI Summary that has a Flash AI Score - this scans all the reviews and summarizes them. Insd
A persistent chat interface is also available.
Here’s a view of the full review summary which is helpful and well done:
This is the view when expanding the price search:
I haven’t had time to put Flash through all the paces, but the VeggieDents threw it for a loop - it found this was the low price:
But that’s the wrong variation, so the calculation is all wrong. Several of the tiles are the wrong product as well. I’d rate this one a solid C - clean UI, works even with Amazon, but has some rough edges and the system doesn’t do sell with some basic ecommerce concepts.
Agentic Payment News Items
There are two payment updates this week of notes and they both involve MCP. If MCP is new to you, it stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a technology by Anthropic that allows LLMs, and thus agents, to access external systems. It’s kind of like APIs, but LLMs need more context to use APIs and that’s what MCP brings to the table.
There’s an addition to MCP called MCP-UI that let’s the external system inject user interface components into the chat. This week our friends at Agentic payment company Nekuda (the CEO, Ayal Karmi, was a podcast guest here if you missed it) have a neat demonstration that blends MCP-UI and agentic payments to illustrate how the two can work together.
Here’s the substack article - it’s a great read if this is of interest to you:
And here’s a short video demonstration, or you can run it yourself here.
While this is a cool demonstration and I love MCP/MCP-UI and use them all the time, I think we’re in the first batter of the first inning of Agentic Commerce. As you keep reading just this update, for example, you’ll find there are a lot of concerns that MCP may not be secure enough. Also as our fledgling industry matures, there’s going to be agents negotiating price, loyalty, bundle deals, group deals and much more. MCP isn’t the right protocol for that. There’s A2A, that feels early too. My view is there will be something that we don’t know about yet that becomes the standard and it’s a wee bit too early to lock in on something.
Visa Enhances Visa Intelligent Commerce
This week Visa announced this week (details here and here) an MCP server and a Acceptance Agent Toolkit.
The MCP Servers allows agents to connect to their Intelligent Commerce capabilities. The Acceptance Agent gives customer service agents at merchants that accept visa an interface that allows them to take actions in a chat like interface vs. systems that have to be built against APIs at the merchant’s site. For example, a rep can say: “Create an invoice for $100 for John Doe, due Friday.” or “issue a refund to Bob”.
Agentic Commerce Agents, Trust and Authentication
In traditional digital consumer (for products) commerce, when someone wants to buy something, we don’t do a lot of investigation or have a complex ‘Know Your Customer (KYC)’ workflow. If your credit card or digital wallet authenticates you, we’re good to go. Heck we even throw up a guest checkout to reduce any friction at all, no login required, come on in!
But in more complex consumer transactions and B2B, service transactions and many financial transactions, there is a lot more authentication and trust that has to be navigated and verified. This week there are two items of interest on this topic.
Forbes: ‘Who Are You’ and ‘How Can You Pay’
If Agentic Trust is a topic of interest to you, this Forbes article does a good job of outlining the issues around trust and payments that we’re going to see rise as Agentice commerce spreads
Agentic Trust: One startup, Kite, working on the problem.
This week, PayPal’s investment arm, PayPal Ventures led a $18m funding round for Kite. Details here and here.
What does Kite do? Here’s a brief blurb:
The company recently launched Kite Agent Identity Resolution, or “Kite AIR” – a pioneering solution that enables autonomous agents to authenticate, transact, and operate independently in real-world environments. The system delivers programmable identity, native stablecoin payment, and policy enforcement on a blockchain optimized for autonomous agents. Kite AIR includes two core components: Agent Passport, a verifiable identity with operational guardrails; and Agent App Store, where agents can discover and pay to access services such as APIs, data, and commerce tools. It is live today through open integrations with popular commerce platforms like Shopify and PayPal.
Blockchain is an interesting and appropriate technology for Agent registration, authentication and verification. Many of the agent payment and authentication platforms are going to require a consumer or B2B buyer/seller to have a crypto wallet (stablecoin or otherwise) which I’m not sold on happening.
Preview of Next Week’s Retailgentic Content
Coming up this week on Retailgentic, Tuesday we’ll have part two of our three part series titled: GEO for Retailers, Brands and Agencies - Optimize the Six Agentic Shopping Engines for Holiday '25 to Drive Maximum Sales (Part 1 is here if you missed it).
On the pod this week we have my good friend and one of my favorite Digital Commerce trend analysts, Kasey Lobough from Deloitte. Heck, is title is ‘Chief Futurist’, so there you go and he really delivers!