Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 8/17-8/23 (week 34/52):
Even a quieter week has some great new datapoints that indicated Agentic Shopping continues to rise and big things are coming...
As we head into the Labor day weekend, there’s a natural quote period in the back-half of August and then the week after Labor Day, news should start dropping like crazy. That being said, we had some new consumer data from Adobe and Accenture, a baller Cornell report for my fellow Agentic nerds and we kick it off with Benedict kind of predict-hinting about big things to come?
Benedict Evan’s Newsletter
Right after we published last week Benedict Evans (internet analyst, formerly of A16Z, great weekly read, etc.) published his newsletter. Towards the end of his weekly piece he has his weekly ‘what I’m thinking about piece', called ‘Column’ and this week he slipped this in there:
This summer, I spoke to a bunch of senior people in retail, who said, in essence, that everyone has had a dozen big AI presentations now. They’ve had Google/Microsoft, Bain/BCG/McKinsey, WPP and Accenture, and maybe Stripe and Shopify. They’ve got search working, so you can ask “what would I take on a picnic?” - a query that would never have worked before LLMs.
They have review summarisation and a SKU re-tagging project, and their marketing people have strong opinions about the stuff that Google and Meta have launched to optimise advertising. But now they wonder, “okay, is that it?” What’s the step two? And it seems to me that an LLM that knows who you are, and what you care about, and what you’re interested in, and what these things ARE, not just what their SKUs look like, would be a big part of the answer. But then again, no one can see the whole elephant, and no one wants to let anyone else see it first.
My take on what Benedict is saying here is we all know there’s something big coming, the ChatGPT rumor about a checkout feels like it’s part of something even bigger. and we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. The frontier engine companies are having super-secret NDA meetings with retailers and the retailers are excited, but can’t talk about it. I think if something’s going to come out, it will be in the next 67 days, so we should know soon enough!
The USDC Released Q2 Ecommerce Data and 😴😴😴😴😴
The most common question I get these days is why I’m so excited about Agentic Commerce. This chart shows that as an industry we need a ⚡️⚡️⚡️. Ecommerce should be so awesome that it’s growing 20-40% y/y 16.3% is too slow IMHO. Retail sales grew 3.9% during the same period, so we’re about 12.4% faster, but what do we need to do to make the experience so awesome we get back to the 20%+ growth rates?
I think the answer is Agentic Commerce - it will be faster, easier, more enjoyable, and 10x more personalized than anything we’ve experienced before. And if the Agentic Shopping Engines do it right, we can get rid of all the advertising noise that has spammed up the entire experience.
Accenture AI Report
This week I saw an article that referenced several datapoints in Accenture report that was from June, but new to me and the article was current so I’m going to use that as enough of a reason to share the datapoints with you here even though they technically didn’t come out this week.
GenAI as influential as stores in recos
First in their survey, they asked active GenAI users what they trust for purchase recommendations. Stores were highest at 19%, followed closely by GenAI at 18%. A distant third was social media and online marketplaces, and then down at number five you have ‘friends and family’ - so much for Word of mouth, say hello to ‘word of machine’ (that’s a reference to our podcast this week with Luca Cian that if you find any of this consumer behavior interesting, it’s on your must listen list!
What % of consumers are ready for Agents to buy on their behalf?
Good question, the answer is:
Want more?
You can read the whole Accenture paper here:
Speaking of Academics….
A team of researches at Cornell posited the question: what do AI agents buy…and why? To research this, they created an agent and simulated marketplace that randomizes product placement, pricing, ratings and reviews and then ran simulations. THEN they said -well the sellers are going to optimize for what they see the agents doing and found that optimization increased outcomes 25%+
There are a lot more interesting observations on this one, but be ready, it’s 41 pages of pretty dense content and gets pretty far out there on how all this works.
If you’re super into this they open sourced the agent, the sandbox and marketplace and provide all the data - so go crazy!!
Adobe reports: GenAI Traffic to Ecommerce Sites Up 4,700% 👀🚀
This Forbes piece has all the details, but this chart really is the chef’s kiss:
None of the data out so far has ChatGPT-5 yet, where I suspect we’re going to see quite a surge up.
Other trends from the Adobe data of note:
38% of consumers have used GenAI for shopping
90% of consumers trust GenAI’s recos
Shopping funnel usage amongst those that have tried:
53% - Research
40% - Product Recos (what I call Find)
36% - Seeking deals
30% - Creating shopping lists
29% - Finding unique products
26% - Virtual try ons
Finally, for folks that have tried Agentic Shopping - 85% said it improved the experience and 73% said it is now their primary source of research
Housekeeping
Housekeeping note! We’re going to drop an awesome pod this Tuesday instead of our usual Thursday drop so you have time to download that for your Labor Day Weekend trips. We won’t have a weekly update out next weekend (Aug 30/31), but will be back after Labor Day Week with a big piece Sept 2 and we’ll be back to Thursday pod drops starting Sept 4th.
It’s going to be a crazy rest of the year for Agentic Commerce from 9/2 - 12/31 this year, so charge up your 🪫 to be 🔋 for the next four months of frenetic action!
Also, a reminder:
o RetailClub - Sept 14-17 in Huntington Beach - I’ll be speaking and ReFiBuy will be debuting the product we’ve been working on at AI-speeds, come by our booth and fun hang-out spot-the Agentic Oasis to chat about all things Agentic Commerce!
o ShopTalk Fall - I’ll be there for Sept 18 and 19 and would love to meet and for retail/brands we’ll be giving ReFiBuy demos scheduled by appointment.
o Groceryshop - We’ll be there 9/28-10/1 - also giving ReFiBuy demos scheduled by appointment.
I hope to catch-up or meet many of you in the last 4 of 2025!
Finally, have a great Labor Day!