Labor Day Weekend Edition: Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 8/24-8/30 (week 35/52)

AI Agents don't sleep and they don't take off weekends or Labor Day, so neither do we. LETS GO! 🤖🔥🚀

Aug 30, 2025

The talk of the retail world was this weeks chart and article from EMARKETER showing 18% consumers trust GenAI the most compared to 10% for the website and closing in on stores at 19%. You’ll note search engine is at 11% and marketplace at 15%. Personally, I think the proliferation of ads on marketplaces like Amazon and Google have tipped from useful at 10% ad-load to now that we’re at 50-90% ad-load, into the ‘not trustworthy/spammy ads’ category.

EMARKETER’s conclusion:

“Marketers and ecomm pros should integrate GenAI-powered recommendation engines into their platforms—or risk losing relevance. Also consider syndicating product data to GenAI ecosystems (like ChatGPT plugins or Google’s AI Overviews) to ensure visibility where consumers are actively looking.”

Speaking of Websites…

Shameless plug alert: This also ties into my RetailClub Workshop, Tuesday, September 16th:

We’ll be discussing the death of the brand/retailer website. Based on this data, it doesn’t look good for the website! We have limited spots, so make sure to A. come to RetailClub and B. Sign up for the workshop, before it fills up!

Alex Rampell, A16Z GP, on Agentic Commerce

I’d be remiss if I didn’t kick it off by making sure you caught our podcast this week with A16Z’s Alex Rampell. It’s a tight 35 minutes and we go into more detail than Alex and Justine Moore went into in their great article: “Is Google Screwed? Maybe. But Not How You Think.

Each week our podcast audience is growing rapidly and this one shattered all the records with tremendous engagement and positive reviews.

Video: YouTube

Watch in-line here or click through→

Audio:Spotify→ (listen from this post)

Audio: Other podcast players→

Apple podcast player here.
All others here.

Speaking of A16Z and AI Agents: Aaron Levie + Steven Sinofsky: Our Agentic AI-Worker Future Pod

Here on Retailgentic we spend 99% of our focus on the intersection of Agentic and Retail and what it means ‘outside in’ - meaning, how will this change consumer behavior, create new online channels, disrupt traditional channels, like Google, etc.

But there is ‘another side’ to the Agentic revolution - the ‘inside out’ - meaning - how can digital commerce leaders make your org more efficient, faster, more nimble and ultimately more profitable. Aaron Levie (a GREAT X follow bt), CEO of Box, has been way out in front of this aspect of Agentic and brings the heat in this discussion.

Leveraging Agentic AI Internally: 4 Retailer/Brand Real-World Case Studies: (Walmart, Target, Zara and Reckitts)

While we’re on this topic, here’s four case studies that may help you think through opportunities in your org. The first is a three-fer from AIInvest here that goes through three different approaches on how to leverage Agentic AI internally from Walmart, Target and Zara. I’ve been reading a lot of these over the last 6 months and what’s great is we’re now starting to see some quantifiable numbers coming in on the impact from these early implementations and the results are all promising, but it’s just the start. Agentic AI is going to change both sides of the coin - the outside in and the inside out transforming commerce in the next 2-3 years in ways it’s hard to imagine.

The TL;DR:

Walmart: Agents in their logistics system have optimized routs and saved $75m in shipping fees. Dynamic pricing algorithms have increased margins by .26% which doesn’t seem like much, but it comes at near 0 cost, so it’s all pure margin and .26% times a really big number (this is Walmart!) is..still a big number.
Target: Using Agentic for store-level inventory planning, stock allocation and focused on reducing mark downs (pricing optimization).
Zara: Zara has invested in putting Agentic agents into their supply chain. As a result they have reduced their turn around time (this is fast fashion) from idea to product to one week AND reduced overstocks by 20%, and reduced fabric waste by 15%. Their AI-powered virtual try on capability has reduced size-related returns by double digits.

Reckitts is a brand holding company with a plethora of health/home/beauty brands we’re all familiar with like Lysol, Mucinex, Clearsil and many more. This case study (from their consulting vendor) talks about how Reckitt has deployed over 500 marketing agents to various markets across the US with plans to scale up.

Anthropic Enters the Agentic Browser Wars, Kind Of?

Anthropic announced that they are in an early pilot program with a Chrome extension that, like Perplexity’s Comet, adds a Claude-powered AI assistant to the browser - in this case they ‘take over’ Google’s Chrome.

In this short YouTube video, they show off the capabilities and while sadly they don’t show it in an Agentic Commerce context, they do show Claude for Chrome ordering some food via Doordash and also apartment hunting on Zillow, so they are in our zip code and I’m sure it will have many Agentic Commerce capabilities. We’ve signed up for the Pilot and if admitted will put Claude for Chrome through its paces and report our findings.

Have You Had Your ChatGPT Glow Up?

The industry publication, Business of Fashion, had a great piece this week (sub required), using the ‘ChatGPT Glow Up’ trend as a jumping off point to illustrate that GEO is Beauty’s new SEO.

🚨GEO Three Part Series ALERT 🚨

GEO is a super hot topic with retailers and brands and post LDW, we’re going to be launching a three part series that’s going to go deep on this topic with big-picture strategies and tactics every retailer and brand can (and should!) implement before Holiday 2025. Stay tuned.

Lightning Round 3 Articles to Wrap:

Loyalty program provider Talon one published this piece predicting what happens with loyalty programs that was interesting. I think these second order aspects of Agentic Commerce: pricing, personalization and loyalty are going to be the big topic next year, so good to get a jump on them.
PWC’s retail group published this piece predicting: The Retail Future is Agentic
Total Retail has this piece that explores how Agentic Commerce will impact the Retailer/Brand relationship.