Interesting Agentic Shopping reading this week...
Consumer trends, Perplexity news+++, EMARKETER stuns market with prediction, and Amazon bots running around your hood - what could go wrong?
It was another quite active week in the world of Agentic Shopping. Here’s some highlights from the news this week. Let’s start with a new datapoint on consumer behavior as it relates to GenAI and shopping:
Forerunner Ventures 2025 Annual Consumer Report
Forerunner Ventures is a consumer-oriented venture firm does an annual consumer survey that is here (n=1,428).
It’s another ‘mega deck’ with 198 slides, slide 88 was most applicable to Agentic Shopping→
When you ask consumers where their interest lies in AI offerings, ‘Shopping’ is second only to ‘Plan trips’ (travel). Clearly consumers are saying that they aren’t satisfied with the existing shopping and travel experiences and they believe GenAI can help with both.
Microsoft Strategy Leader on Agentic Shopping
Microsoft executive, Mike Edmonds, Senior Director of Strategy, Worldwide Retail and consumer Goods published on LinkedIn this article that highlights some of the trends leading to Agentic shopping, plus GEO vs. SEO and finally he has some great tips on how to prepare for the AI Shopping agent future, here’s three of them, but I recommend reading the entire piece. The source material is impeccable ;-)
Enrich your product data – AI can't recommend what it doesn't understand.
Design for multi-modal discovery – Text, voice, image, video. Be everywhere your customers are.
Optimize for humans and AI agents – Think APIs, structured content, and conversational relevance.
Gotta read the article here.
EMARKETER makes a huge prediction for GenAI Search Revenues
Since launching Retailgentic, I’ve had many inbound questions from Wall St - there’s a huge debate going on about GenAI vs. Google - the big question boils down to: is Google in an innovator’s dilemma and if they are, can they navigate out or will the be yet another company to succumb to the theory of the innovator’s dilemma. (more on this topic when we get to Perplexity, turns out they have a big POV).
Well, EMARKETER has an excellent report that puts a new datapoint out there that’s sure to be the talk of Wall st. next week→
In summary, EMARKETER predicts that 13.6% of total search ad spend in the US will move to AI search ad spending.
I’ve read this one twice and they do a good job of not making a call on if this is a move within google (core search to gemini) or if it’s third parties (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, XAI, Microsoft Copilot) that are able to carve this off - if you’re one of the David’s to Google’s Goliath, you have your sights on it NOT being Google. This is going to be the most interesting tech battle in decades to watch play out and I’m hear for it. 🍿 It also has huge implications for retail. For decades, retail has been paying a Google tax (you think it’s CAC, but when you pay it for every visit - it’s not CAC folks)
Our friend Kiri Masters had a great take on this in her recent Forbes piece here.
Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, at Bloomberg conference.
I’m a huge fan of Aravind - the typical strategy for a disruptor CEO is to talk about how your offering is better, Aravind does a great job at this, but he adds a very interesting PT Barnum element to his talks - he goes after Google HARD. There’s the old adage - don’t poke the bear. Aravind thumbs it on the nose, pulls on it’s ears and says “nanner nanner nanner”.
This 20min interview is a great encapsulation of ‘full-on Aravind’ - I don’t think the reporter gets it, but he basically is a ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ true believer/maximalist and right at 5:30 he points out that google has the best models, they have a perplexity clone in ‘AI mode’, so why don’t they just flip over google.com? (the answer I think the reporter misses is - the innovator’s dilemma - they can’t lose all that revenue and they never will) - “Why are they not shipping these features to users? If it’s so great go ahead and put it on google.com” - he’s calling their bluff (or some would say poking the 🧸 very hard indeed.
Anyway, this substack isn’t about my fascination on this topic, it’s about agentic shopping. Perplexity’s working on a new Agentic browser ‘Comet’ and he sent the reporter a video of Comet finding and booking a flight. In the video above he
Perplexity Hotel Agentic Booking
Dhruv Bhalla is the Product manager at perplexity for their consumer verticals, which I believe are Travel and Shopping.
He announced this week you can book hotels (not flights…yet!) right in Perplexity. Here’s the post, the video is < 2mins and worth a look.
I strongly recommend following Dhruv on LinkedIn and/or X/Twitter.
Perplexity Memory (and Agentic Shopping)
Last Perplexity I promise, Aravind put a post out that “Memory is being slowly rolled out to Perplexity users. This will be integrated with all the verticals we are working on: finance, sports, shopping and travel.” How many times have you gone thru an e-commerce flow and told it your shoe size or your preference for dog food or the type of pet you have, etc. memory on top of a universal shopping agent could be like peanut butter and jelly - a marriage made in heaven!
Perplexity Agentic Shopping, Travel and Memory walk-through: Wed June 11th at 3pm ET // 12pm PT
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Perplexity’s capabilities and I’ve found that many retailers and brands haven’t seen all the Perplexity features, so we’re going to memorialize where Perplexity is with a livestream that will be recorded. We’ll keep it to 30 minutes and hope to have 5-10mins for Q+A. We’ll be showing Shopping, Travel and Memory and talking about some predictions on Comet. Tune in:
Note to readers - I’ll be following the Agentic Travel space very closely as It’s basically one zip code away from Agentic Shopping and with some of the LLM Engines it’s going to be higher priority than Shopping so will act as a harbinger of things to come.
Shopify’s Catalog API (closed)
There’s a lot of buzz about Shopify quietly dropping a ‘god mode catalog api’ as part of their Summer 25 edition release - you can find it in here.
‘God mode’ means EVERY Shopify store’s product catalog is available. Because of the closed nature of the API, everyone has questions such as:
Despite their peppy Canadian appearance, Shopify is nefarious for perniciously charging a large % for everything - that raises the question - if a third party system uses this API will it be pulled into the 15-20% ‘Shopify tax’ structure?
Does this API cover Shopify standard and Plus?
What happens if two Shopify sell the same thing - let’s say an iPhone cable - I don’t know for sure, but I bet there are at least 100 stores if not 1000 that will have that SKU. Does the API give you all of them, does it pick the lowest price, does it do any canonicalization at all?
What’s the intent of this API - is this a back door for the big guys like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Can merchants turn this off? Maybe you’re a b2b seller using Shopify and you want to opt out of this. Can you?
Believe it or not, that’s the short list of questions.
GenAI Shopping Ads on your lock screen? Samsung says: HECK YES!
Shout out to reader Cameron for pointing this article out.
Samsung and Glance AI announced a partnership where not only will the app auto-roll out to the Samsung phones, but the lock screen will start to show GenAI shopping images (ads) from the app. This caused the reader of the original article to say:
“I do not, and I can’t emphasize this enough, ever want to see an ad on my lock screen.”
I don’t know if it found me that hard to find Nintendo Switch 2 and was telling me on the lock screen, or was adding value, I wouldn’t be as negative as the reviewer was. Time will tell on this one!
Curious?!
You can try out the Glance AI Shopping app here. (it’s available on iOS as well as Android, just not going to be auto-loaded and on your lockscreen) I wouldn’t say it’s agentic, it looks more like a virtual try on type experience, but I haven’t had time to dive deep into it yet.
Palate cleanser: Amazon Humanoid Deliver Robots
Finally, The Information dropped a scoop that Amazon is preparing to test humanoid robots for ‘from the truck to your house’ package delivery. There’s more in this article. In a LinkedIn post, I joked that it should look like the Droid ships from Star Wars Episode 1 and Steve Coakley dropped a banger GenAI image of what I imagine this could look like in the comments that I’ve included here for your enjoyment.
Can you imagine an swarm of Amazon drones humming overhead while 5 of these run around your neighborhood slingin’ packages?
Pleasant dreams tonight🤪