Microsoft Joins Retailgentic! Michele Fisher & Atanu Ghosh on Copilot, Agentic Commerce, Loyalty, Ads, and Does Conversational Discovery Changes Everything?
One of our Retailgentic stretch goals is landing 'The Agentic Commerce 6" (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, META, Microsoft and Perplexity) on the pod. Today we check off number three!
Microsoft - Welcome to Retailgentic!
In this episode, we sit down with Michele Fisher (Global Director, Business Strategy for Retail & CPG) and Atanu Ghosh (Director of Agentic Commerce & AI Innovation), who sit at the intersection of Azure AI, Copilot, and real-world retail and brand Agentic Commerce implementations.
They’re in constant conversations with global retailers and brands trying to figure out what actually changes when AI agents become the customer.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
This conversation dives into how Microsoft is thinking about agentic commerce as a full operating model shift, not just a feature or channel.
From Copilot shopping to data infrastructure to ads inside LLMs, the discussion connects the dots between:
Highlights
Conversational discovery is fundamentally different from search: The way people talk about brands inside AI systems looks nothing like traditional keyword behavior, and most companies have zero visibility into it.
Agentic commerce is not one thing, it’s an operating model shift: Microsoft defines it broadly: agents participating in discovery, decision-making, and transactions, not just checkout.
Copilot + catalog + data = the new commerce stack
Ads are changing from persuasion to evaluation: Agents don’t care about creative. They evaluate structured data, trust signals, and relevance.
Loyalty becomes infrastructure, not a program
The “frontier firm” is the North Star: A future where humans and agents work together across workflows, not just AI acting as an assistant.
Protocols like UCP matter more than people realize: Open standards enable discoverability across surfaces and prevent fragmentation in agent-driven ecosystems.
The funnel is collapsing
If your brand is still thinking about traffic as the starting point, you’re already behind.
In an agentic world, discovery happens before you ever see the user, and increasingly, without them.
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.
Or, we have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!) →
Check out the materials we discuss:
👉 2025: The year the Frontier Firm is born
Want More Awesome-sauce Agentic Commerce Content?
Stay on top of what’s happening in agentic commerce, from the tools powering it to the founders building with it by following us across platforms:
Podcast: https://retailgentic.transistor.fm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retailgentic/
We're here to make sense of what’s next in retail + AI and bring you along for the ride. Subscribe and stay tuned!
Love the Agentic Commerce 6-frame, Scot. Love the Agentic Commerce 6-frame, Scot. My quibble: it's 7.
Rufus (now Alexa's shopping assistant) is its own commerce surface. It's not a foundation model API, and there's no door for outside developers. Just a closed loop sitting on billions of transactions of intent signal. It doesn't fit under any of your six because Amazon isn't courting external commerce participants the way the rest are.
For brands deciding where AEO budget goes, treating Rufus as a 7th distinct surface with its own playbook is more honest than slotting it under "other." What works for Claude or Gemini doesn't carry over. Rufus optimization runs on Amazon's PDP, A+ content, and the search behavior your shoppers actually have inside Alexa.