Last '25 Agentic Commerce News Update: Steve Madden+Google Pay on Instant Checkout; Deloitte embraces ACO (Agentic Commerce Optimization) and Bain's 2030 Prediction plus Pods!
What year, and in classic Agentic Commerce fashion, it's ending with a 💥
It’s been an incredible year and this is our last post of 2025 - we appreciate all our subscribers+readers and want to thank you and send a Happy Holiday and Happy New Year from everyone here at Retailgentic and ReFiBuy! 🎅🎊
2026 is going to be the year of Agentic Commerce and we’ll be here giving you insider real-time information and deep analysis unavailable anywhere else. Rest up, it’s gonna be
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Deloitte: Agentic Commerce: Redefining Retail Economics (❤️’s Agentic Commerce Optimization - ACO >> AEO/GEO)
Deloitte has a very strong report out that we were excited to see embraces the concept of Agentic Commerce Optimization we introduced in September of 25.
Here’s a figure from the report→
Here’s the PDF of the report, great reading for your Holiday break here→
Steve Madden Launches on Instant Checkout
Friend of Retailgentic is now live on Instant Checkout. Congrats to Josh and Colleen and the whole team on pushing to get this live by EOY!
Here’s an example from 12/20/25→
Product card(s)→
And offer card showing the Buy button enabled!
Note, for some reason folks listing via Shopify are seeing this color code variation piece, that seems to be part of a WIP.
G-Pay Now Available on Instant Checkout
While exploring this and updating on other stores, we discovered somewhat by accident that many Instant Checkout vendors are showing Google Pay (aka G-Pay). Here’s an Etsy example. Not only is it showing up, but it’s 100% wired up and working!
For some reason, G Pay continues to insist I’m at ChannelAdvisor, can’t figure out how to get rid of that - guess they are TBT’ing it.
I have to admit, given that ChatGPT and Google are competing pretty vigorously and have competing Agentic Commerce payment protocols, I didn’t see coming anytime soon. It’s a credit to ChatGPTs to be merchant-friendly to allow so many different payment options, even ones that effectively compete.
Bain’s 2030 Predictions
Long-time readers will know there’s a set of 6-7 (6….7….6…7) stats around Agentic Commerce I track very diligently and one of my tippy top datapoints is 4-5yr predictions.
As of 12/20/25 I have:
Morgan Stanley: Agentic Commerce will be 20% of ecommerce by 2030
PayPal CEO: Agentic Commerce will be 25% of ecommerce by 2030
Bain’s 2030 Forecast
Bain came out with their forecast which does a pretty detailed analysis and came up right in that strike zone: 15-25% - that’s three datapoints now lining up to this 15-25% zone with 20% forming as a ‘consensus’ I think what’s interesting is the diversity of approaches and types of companies. We have a Payments company, Wall St analyst and large consulting firm.
Stripe Announces Agentic Commerce Suite
As ecommerce matures and everything becomes more verticalized, payments companies want to move ‘up the stack’ and all ecommerce companies want to be payment companies. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite adds on top of payments, the ability to turn on and off agents, manage your catalog between agents and more. Details here - this post has a short video→
Retail Brew Has Great Tastes (and Content!)
I was fortunate enough to be featured in not one, but two awesome Retail Brew articles:
RB1: Can Walmart’s AI bet close the gap with Amazon?
This article digs into Walmart’s strategy around AI - could this be the wedge that allows them to finally slingshot past Amazon? We’ll know more in 2026!
RB2: This Year Marked the Birth of Agentic Commerce
This piece is a review of Agentic Commerce highlights in 2025 and previews what’s coming up in 2026.
TotalRetail: Agentic Commerce - a Retail Imperative 😳
That was fast! Agentic Commerce was born in early 2025 and here we are at the end of 2025 and it according to TotalRetail - it’s ‘Becoming a Retail Imperative’ - I couldn’t agree more! Let’s dig in→
This is a great piece and worth the read (by the editor nonetheless!), the TL;DR is:
Legacy e-commerce is no longer aligned with the consumer
It’s here NOW (not future/vaporware) - discovery, evaluation, purchase (I prefer Research, Find, Buy).
Trad e-commerce has flat conversion and CAC up and to the 📈
Agentic commerce conversion rates are significantly higher
Wow, strong stuff!
Sam Altman Pods
While not about Agentic Commerce or Instant Checkout, on this pod where Sam sits down with tech pod’r, Alex Kantrowitz and Alex jumps right into the ‘is this an AI bubble’ topic and Sam has what in my opinion are some good answers to the crazy infrastructure spend they are contemplating.
Sam on Ted on NPR
Sam also had a 1hr convo on NPR in a ‘Ted Radio Hour’ podcast/broadcast thing that is here - nothing agentic and as it’s super consumery the host spends all their time trying to drum up doomsday scenarios. Useful to see where the main-stream press is taking things.
Demis on Pods
Demis Nassabis is the head of DeepMind and Gemini - effectively the head of AI at Google. He appeared on Axios here (this is 2wks ago so a bit long in the tooth in our world - haha)→
Here he is very recently on an internal Deepseek pod→