Global Advisors | Quantified Strategy Consulting

“The transition from traditional web or app search to agent-led commerce represents the next great evolution in retail. We aren’t just watching the shift, we are driving it.” – John Furner – President, CEO Walmart US

When John Furner speaks about the shift from traditional web or app search to agent-led commerce, he is putting words to a structural change that has been building at the intersection of artificial intelligence, retail strategy and consumer behaviour for more than two decades. His quote does not describe a marginal optimisation of online shopping; it points to a reconfiguration of how demand is discovered, shaped and fulfilled in the digital economy.

John Furner: An operator at the centre of AI-led retail

John Furner built his leadership reputation inside one of the most operationally demanding businesses in the world. Before being named President and CEO of Walmart U.S., and then incoming President and CEO of Walmart Inc., he held a series of roles that grounded him in the realities of store operations, merchandising and labour-intensive retail at scale.^1,4 That background matters to the way he talks about AI.

Unlike many technology narratives that begin in the lab, Walmart’s AI story has been forged in distribution centres, supercentres and neighbourhood markets. Under Doug McMillon, and increasingly under Furner, Walmart framed AI not as a side project but as a new backbone for the business.¹ Analysts note that as Furner steps into the global CEO role, the board describes the next chapter as one “fueled by innovation and AI”.¹ His quote about agent-led commerce sits squarely in that strategic context.

Furner has consistently emphasised pragmatic, measurable outcomes from technology adoption: better inventory accuracy, improved shelf availability, faster fulfilment and fewer customer headaches.^1,4 He has also been explicit that every job in the company will change in some way under AI – from collecting trolleys in car parks to technology development and leadership roles.⁴ In other words, for Furner, agent-led commerce is not simply a new consumer interface; it is a catalyst for rethinking work, operations and value creation across the retail stack.

The specific context of the quote: Walmart, Google and Gemini

The quote originates in the announcement of a partnership between Walmart and Google to bring Walmart and Sam’s Club product discovery directly into Google’s Gemini AI environment.^2,3,5 Rather than treating AI search as an external channel to be optimised, the collaboration embeds Walmart’s assortment, pricing and fulfilment options into an intelligent agent that can converse with customers inside Gemini.

In this setting, Furner’s words perform several functions:

• They frame the shift from keyword-driven search (type an item, browse lists) to goal- or task-based interaction (“help me plan a camping trip”), where an agent orchestrates the entire shopping journey.^2,3
• They signal that Walmart is not content to be a passive catalogue inside someone else’s interface, but intends to shape the emerging standards for “agentic commerce” – an approach where software agents work on behalf of customers to plan, select and purchase.^2,3,4
• They reassure investors and partners that the company sees AI as a core strategic layer, not as an optional experiment or promotional gimmick.^1,4,6

The Walmart – Google experience is designed to allow a shopper to ask broad, life-context questions – for example, how to prepare for spring camping – and receive curated product bundles drawn from Walmart and Sam’s Club inventory, updated dynamically as the conversation unfolds.^2,3 The system does not simply return search results; it proposes solutions and refines them interactively. The agent becomes a kind of digital retail concierge.

Technically, this is underpinned by the pairing of Gemini’s foundation models with Walmart’s internal data on assortment, pricing, local availability and fulfilment options.³ Strategically, it positions Walmart to participate in – and influence – the universal protocols that might govern how agents transact across merchants, platforms and services in the coming decade.

From web search to agent-led commerce: why this is a step-change

To understand why Furner describes this as “the next great evolution in retail”, it is useful to place agent-led commerce in a longer history of digital retail evolution.

1. Catalogue search and the era of the query box

The first wave of e-commerce was built around catalogue search: customers navigated static product hierarchies or typed keywords into a search box. Relevance was determined by text matching and basic filters. Power resided in whoever controlled the dominant search interface or marketplace.

This model mapped well onto traditional retail metaphors – aisles, departments, categories – and it assumed that the customer knew roughly what they were looking for. Retailers competed on breadth of assortment, price transparency, delivery speed and user interface design.

2. Personalisation and recommendation

The second wave saw retailers deploy recommendation engines, collaborative filtering and behavioural targeting to personalise product suggestions. Here, algorithmic theories drawn from machine learning and statistics began to shape retail experiences, but the core unit remained the search query or product page.

Recommendations were adaptively presented around known products and purchase history, nudging customers to complementary or higher-margin items. Many of the leading ideas came from research in recommender systems, one of the most commercially influential branches of applied machine learning.

3. Conversational interfaces and agentic commerce

Agent-led commerce represents a third wave. Instead of asking customers to break down their needs into discrete product searches, it allows them to:

• Express goals (“host a birthday party for ten-year-olds”), constraints (“under £100, dietary restrictions, limited time”) and context (“small flat, no oven”).
• Delegate the planning and selection process to an AI agent that operates across categories, channels and services.
• Iterate interactively, with the agent updating recommendations and baskets as the conversation evolves.

In this model, the agent becomes a co-pilot for both discovery and decision-making. It can optimise not only for price and relevance, but also for timing, delivery logistics, dietary requirements, compatibility across items and even sustainability preferences, depending on the data and constraints it is given. The underlying technologies draw on advances in large language models, planning algorithms and multi-agent coordination.

For retailers, the shift is profound:

• It moves the locus of competition from web page design and keyword bidding to who supplies the most capable and trustworthy agents.
• It elevates operational capabilities – inventory accuracy, fulfilment reliability, returns processing – because an agent that cannot deliver on its promises will quickly lose trust.
• It opens the door to autonomous or semi-autonomous shopping flows, such as automatic replenishment, anticipatory shipping or continuous cart management, where the agent monitors needs and executes under defined guardrails.

Furner’s assertion that Walmart is “driving” the shift needs to be understood against this backdrop. Internally, Walmart has already invested in a family of “super agents” for shoppers, associates, partners and developers, including Sparky (customer assistant), My Assistant (associate productivity), Marty (partner and advertising support) and WIBEY (developer tooling).^1,4 Externally, initiatives like integrating with ChatGPT for “instant checkout” and partnering with Google on Gemini experiences demonstrate a strategy of meeting customers inside the agents they already use.^1,3,4

Agent-led commerce inside Walmart: from vision to practice

Agent-led commerce is not just a phrase in a press release for Walmart. The company has been progressively building the capabilities required to make it a practical reality.

AI-native shopping journeys

Walmart has rolled out AI-powered search experiences that allow customers to describe occasions or problems rather than individual items – for example, planning a party or organising a kitchen.¹ The system then infers needs across multiple categories and pre-populates baskets or recommendations accordingly.

At the same time, the company has been piloting “replenishment” features that create suggested baskets based on past purchases, letting customers approve, modify or decline the auto-generated order.¹ This is an early expression of agentic behaviour: the system anticipates needs and does the heavy lifting of basket formation.

Super agents as an organisational pattern

Internally, Walmart has articulated a vision of multiple domain-specific “super agents” that share core capabilities but specialise in particular user groups.^1,4

• Sparky supports customers, operating as a front-end conversational assistant for shopping journeys.
• My Assistant helps associates draft documents, summarise information and interact with data, freeing them from repetitive tasks.^1,4
• Marty works with partners and increasingly underpins the advertising business, helping brands navigate Walmart’s ecosystem.⁴
• WIBEY accelerates developer productivity, contributing to the internal fabric of AI tooling.⁴

Additionally, Walmart has built a generative AI assistant called Wally for merchandising tasks, using AI to support complex assortment, pricing and space decisions.⁴

Operational AI as the foundation

Critically, Walmart has recognised that agent-led commerce cannot function if the operational substrate is weak. AI agents that promise two-hour delivery on items that are out of stock will immediately erode trust. As a result, the company has deployed AI and automation deep into its supply chain and fulfilment network.^1,4

This includes large-scale investment in warehouse automation (for example, through partnerships with Symbotic), sensor-based tracking to improve inventory accuracy, and forecasting models that help move products closer to expected demand.¹ The philosophy is that data quality is strategy: without reliable, granular data about where products are and how they move, agentic experiences will fail at the last mile.

The intellectual backstory: the theorists behind agents, recommendations and AI commerce

While Walmart and Google are prominent practitioners, the transition Furner describes rests on decades of work by researchers and theorists in several overlapping fields: information retrieval, recommender systems, artificial intelligence agents, behavioural economics and commerce design. A brief backstory of these fields helps illuminate what is now converging under the label “agent-led commerce”.

Information retrieval and the search paradigm

The idea of representing information needs through queries and ranking results based on relevance traces back to mid-20th century information retrieval research. Early work by scholars such as Gerard Salton introduced the vector space model of documents and queries, which underpinned term-weighting schemes like tf-idf (term frequency – inverse document frequency). These ideas influenced both academic search engines and, eventually, commercial web search.

As web content exploded, researchers in IR refined ranking algorithms, indexing structures and relevance feedback mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm assumed that users could express needs in terms of keywords or structured queries, and that the system’s job was to approximate relevance as accurately as possible given those inputs.

Agent-led commerce departs from this model by treating language not as a set of keywords but as an interface for describing goals, constraints and preferences in natural form. Instead of mapping queries to documents, agents must map intentions to actions and sequences of actions – choose, bundle, schedule, pay, deliver.

Recommender systems and personalisation pioneers

The science of recommending products, films or content to users based on their behaviour has roots in the 1990s and early 2000s. Key theorists and practitioners include:

• John Riedl and colleagues, whose work on collaborative filtering and the GroupLens project showed how crowd data could be used to predict individual preferences.
• Yehuda Koren, whose contributions to matrix factorisation methods during the Netflix Prize competition demonstrated the power of latent factor models in recommendation.
• Joseph Konstan and others who explored user experience and trust in recommender systems, highlighting that perceived transparency and control can be as important as accuracy.

These researchers established that it is possible – and commercially powerful – to infer what customers might want, even before they search. Their theories informed the design of recommendation engines across retail, streaming and social platforms.

Agent-led commerce builds on this tradition but extends it. Instead of recommending within a narrow context (“people who bought this also bought”), agents must manage multi-step goals, cross-category constraints and time-sensitive logistics. This requires integrating recommender logic with planning algorithms and conversational interfaces.

Software agents and multi-agent systems

The concept of a software agent – an autonomous entity that perceives its environment, makes decisions and acts on a user’s behalf – has deep roots in AI research. Theorists in this area include:

• Michael Wooldridge, whose work on multi-agent systems formalised how agents can reason, cooperate and compete in complex environments.
• Nick Jennings, who explored practical applications of autonomous agents in business, including negotiation, resource allocation and supply chain management.
• Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, whose widely adopted AI textbook set out the rational agent framework, defining intelligent behaviour as actions that maximise expected utility given beliefs about the world.

In this tradition, agents are not simply chat interfaces; they are decision-making entities with objectives, models of the environment and policies for action. Many of the recent ideas around “agentic” systems – where software components can autonomously plan, call tools, execute workflows and coordinate with other agents – derive conceptually from this line of research.

In retail, agentic commerce can be seen as a large-scale deployment of these ideas: shopper-facing agents negotiate between customer preferences, product availability, pricing, promotions and logistics, while back-end agents manage inventory, routing and labour scheduling.

Conversational AI and natural language understanding

The move from query-driven search to conversational agents has been enabled by advances in natural language processing (NLP), particularly large language models (LLMs). Theorists and practitioners in this domain include researchers who developed transformer architectures, attention mechanisms and large-scale pre-training techniques.

These models provide the linguistic and semantic fluency required for agents to engage in open-ended dialogue. However, in commerce they must be grounded in reliable data and constrained by business rules. Walmart’s AI strategy, for example, combines general-purpose language models with retail-specific systems like Wallaby, which is tuned to Walmart’s own data on catalogues, substitutions and seasonality.¹

Behavioural economics and choice architecture

The design of agent-led experiences also draws on insights from behavioural economics and psychology. Researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have shown how framing, defaults and choice architecture influence decisions.

In an agentic commerce environment, the agent effectively becomes the architect of the customer’s choice set. It decides which alternatives to present, how to explain trade-offs and what defaults to propose. The ethical and strategic implications are significant: the same technologies that can reduce friction and cognitive load can also be used to steer behaviour in subtle ways.

Leading thinkers in digital ethics and AI governance have therefore argued for transparency, contestability and human oversight in agentic systems. For retailers, this becomes a trust question: customers need to believe that the agent is working in their interests, not solely maximising short-term conversion or margin.

Google, Gemini and open standards for agentic commerce

On the technology platform side, Google has been a central theorist and practitioner in both search and AI. With Gemini, its family of multimodal models, Google is positioning AI not just as a backend enhancement to search results but as a front-end conversational partner.

In the joint Walmart – Google initiative, the companies highlight a “Universal Commerce Protocol” designed to let agents interact with merchants in a standardised way.³ While technical details continue to evolve, the ambition reflects a broader movement towards open or semi-open standards for how agents discover, price, bundle and purchase across multiple commerce ecosystems.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has spoken of AI improving every step of the consumer journey, from discovery to delivery, and has explicitly framed the Walmart partnership as a step toward making “agentic commerce” a reality.³ This aligns with the longer arc of Google’s evolution from ten blue links to rich results, shopping tabs and now conversational, transaction-capable agents.

Strategic implications: trust, control and the future of retail interfaces

Furner’s quote hints at the strategic contest that agent-led commerce will intensify. Key questions include:

• Who owns the interface? If customers increasingly begin journeys inside a small number of dominant agents (Gemini, ChatGPT, other assistants), traditional notions of direct traffic, branded apps and search engine optimisation will be reconfigured.
• Who sets the rules? Universal protocols for agentic commerce could distribute power more widely, but the entities that define and maintain those protocols will have disproportionate influence.
• How is trust earned and maintained? Mistakes in retail – wrong products, failed deliveries, billing errors – have tangible consequences. Agent-led systems must combine probabilistic AI outputs with robust guardrails, validation checks and escalation paths to humans.
• How does work change? As McMillon has noted, and Furner will now operationalise, AI will touch every job in the organisation.⁴ Theorists of work and automation have long debated the balance between augmentation and substitution; agentic commerce will be one of the most visible test cases of those theories in practice.

Walmart’s own AI roadmap suggests a disciplined approach: build AI into the fabric of operations, prioritise store-first use cases, move carefully from assistants to agents with strict guardrails and develop platforms that can be standardised and scaled globally.¹ Furner’s quote can thus be read as both a declaration of intent and a statement of competitive philosophy: in a world where AI agents mediate more and more of daily life, retailers must choose whether to be controlled by those agents or to help design them.

For customers, the promise is compelling: less time on search and comparison, more time on what the purchases enable in their lives. For retailers and technologists, the challenge is to build agents that are not only powerful and convenient but also aligned, transparent and worthy of long-term trust. That is the deeper context behind Furner’s assertion that the move from web and app search to agent-led commerce is not just another technology upgrade, but the “next great evolution in retail”.

“Google, OpenAI and Amazon all are racing to create tools that would allow for seamless AI-powered shopping.” – Associated Press

When the Associated Press observes that “Google, OpenAI and Amazon all are racing to create tools that would allow for seamless AI-powered shopping”, it is capturing a pivotal moment in the evolution of retail and of the internet itself. The quote sits at the intersection of several long-running trends: the shift from search to conversation, from static websites to intelligent agents, and from one-size-fits-all retail to deeply personalised, data-driven commerce.

Behind this single sentence lies a complex story of technological breakthroughs, strategic rivalry between the worlds largest technology platforms, and a reimagining of how people discover, evaluate and buy what they need. It also reflects the culmination of decades of research in artificial intelligence, recommendation systems, human-computer interaction and digital economics.

The immediate context: AI agents meet the shopping basket

The Associated Press line comes against the backdrop of a wave of partnerships between AI platforms and major retailers. Google has been integrating its Gemini AI assistant with large retail partners such as Walmart and Sams Club, allowing users to move from a conversational query directly to tailored product recommendations and frictionless checkout.

Instead of typing a product name into a search bar, a shopper can describe a situation or a goal, such as planning a camping trip or furnishing a first flat. Gemini then uses natural language understanding and retailer catalogues to surface relevant items, combine them into coherent baskets and arrange rapid delivery, in some cases within hours.^1,3 The experience is meant to feel less like using a website and more like speaking to a highly knowledgeable personal shopper.

Walmart leaders have described this shift as a move from traditional search-based ecommerce to what they call “agent-led commerce” – shopping journeys mediated not by menus and filters but by AI agents that understand intent, context and personal history.^1,2,3 For Google, this integration is both a way to showcase the capabilities of its Gemini models and a strategic response to OpenAIs work with retailers like Walmart, Etsy and a wide range of Shopify merchants through tools such as Instant Checkout.^2,3

OpenAI, in parallel, has enabled users to browse and buy directly within ChatGPT, turning the chatbot into a commercial surface as well as an information tool.^2,3 Amazon, for its part, has been weaving generative AI into its core marketplace, logistics and voice assistant, using AI models to improve product discovery, summarise reviews, optimise pricing and automate seller operations. Each company is betting that the next era of retail will be shaped by AI agents that can orchestrate entire end-to-end journeys from inspiration to doorstep.

From web search to agentic commerce

The core idea behind “seamless AI-powered shopping” is the replacement of fragmented, multi-step customer journeys with coherent, adaptive experiences guided by AI agents. Historically, online shopping has been built around search boxes, category trees and static product pages. The burden has been on the consumer to know what they want, translate that into search terms, sift through results and manually assemble baskets.

Agentic commerce reverses this burden. The AI system becomes an active participant: interpreting vague goals, proposing options, remembering preferences, coordinating logistics and handling payments, often across multiple merchants. Google and OpenAI have both underpinned their efforts with new open protocols designed to let AI agents communicate with a wide ecosystem of retailers, payment providers and loyalty systems.^3,5

Google refers to its initiative as a Universal Commerce Protocol and describes it as a new standard that allows agents and systems to talk to each other across each step of the shopping journey.^3,5 OpenAI, in turn, introduced the Agentic Commerce Protocol in partnership with Stripe, enabling ChatGPT and other agents to complete purchases from Etsy and millions of Shopify merchants.³ The technical details differ, but the strategic goal is shared: create an infrastructure layer that allows any capable AI agent to act as a universal shopping front end.

In practice, this means that a single conversation might involve discovering a new product, joining a retailers loyalty scheme, receiving personalised offers, adding related items and completing payment – without ever visiting a conventional website or app. The Associated Press quote calls out the intensity of the competition between the major platforms to control this new terrain.

The Associated Press as observer and interpreter

The Associated Press (AP), the attributed source of the quote, has a distinctive role in this story. Founded in 1846, AP is one of the worlds oldest and most widely used news agencies. It operates as a non-profit cooperative, producing reporting that is syndicated globally and used as a baseline for coverage by broadcasters, newspapers and digital platforms.

AP has long been known for its emphasis on factual, neutral reporting, and over the past decade it has also become notable for its early adoption of AI in news production. It has experimented with automated generation of corporate earnings summaries, sports briefs and other data-heavy stories, while also engaging in partnerships with technology companies around synthetic media and content labelling.

By framing the competition between Google, OpenAI and Amazon as a “race” to build seamless AI shopping, AP is doing more than simply documenting product launches. It is drawing attention to the structural stakes: the question of who will mediate the everyday economic decisions of billions of people. APs wording underscores both the speed of innovation and the concentration of power in a handful of technology giants.

APs technology and business correspondents, in covering this domain, typically triangulate between company announcements, analyst commentary and academic work on AI and markets. The quote reflects that blend: it is rooted in concrete developments such as the integration of Gemini with major retailers and the emergence of new commerce protocols, but it also hints at broader theoretical debates about platforms, data and consumer autonomy.

Intellectual roots: from recommendation engines to intelligent agents

The idea of seamless, AI-mediated shopping is the visible tip of an intellectual iceberg that stretches back decades. Several overlapping fields contribute to the current moment: information retrieval, recommender systems, multi-sided platforms, behavioural economics and conversational AI. The leading theorists in these areas laid the groundwork for the systems now shaping retail.

Search and information retrieval

Long before conversational agents, the central challenge of online commerce was helping people find relevant items within vast catalogues. Researchers in information retrieval, such as Gerard Salton in the 1960s and 1970s, developed foundational models for document ranking and term weighting that later underpinned web search.

In the context of commerce, the key innovation was the integration of relevance ranking with commercial signals such as click-through rates, purchase behaviour and sponsored listings. Googles original PageRank algorithm, associated with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, revolutionised how information was organised on the web and provided the basis for search advertising – itself a driver of modern retail. As search became the dominant gateway to online shopping, the line between information retrieval and marketing blurred.

The move to AI-powered shopping agents extends this lineage. Instead of ranking static pages, large language models interpret natural language queries, generate synthetic descriptions and orchestrate actions such as adding items to a basket. The theoretical challenge shifts from simply retrieving documents to modelling context, intent and dialogue.

Recommender systems and personalisation

Much of seamless AI-powered shopping depends on the ability to personalise offers and predict what a particular consumer is likely to want. This traces back to work on recommender systems in the 1990s and 2000s. Pioneers such as John Riedl and Joseph Konstan developed early collaborative filtering systems that analysed user ratings to make personalised suggestions.

The famous Netflix Prize in the mid-2000s catalysed work on matrix factorisation and latent factor models, with researchers like Yehuda Koren demonstrating how to predict preferences from sparse interaction data. Amazon itself became synonymous with recommender systems, popularising the idea that “customers who bought this also bought” could drive significant incremental revenue.

Over time, recommendation theory has expanded to consider not just accuracy but diversity, serendipity and fairness. Work by researchers such as Gediminas Adomavicius and Alexander Tuzhilin analysed trade-offs between competing objectives in recommender systems, while others explored issues of filter bubbles and echo chambers.

In AI-powered shopping, these theoretical concerns are amplified. When a single conversational agent mediates choices across many domains, its recommendation logic effectively becomes a form of personalised market design. It can nudge users towards particular brands, balance commercial incentives with user welfare, and shape long-term consumption habits. The underlying theories of collaborative filtering, contextual bandits and reinforcement learning now operate in a more visible, consequential arena.

Multi-sided platforms and the economics of marketplaces

The race between Google, OpenAI and Amazon is also a contest between different platform models. Economists such as Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole provided the canonical analysis of multi-sided platforms – markets where intermediaries connect distinct groups of users, such as buyers and sellers, advertisers and viewers.

The theory of platform competition explains why network effects and data accumulation can produce powerful incumbents, and why controlling the interface through which users access multiple services confers strategic advantages. Amazon Marketplace, Google Shopping and ad networks, and now AI agents embedded in operating systems or browsers, can all be seen through this lens.

Further work by David Evans, Andrei Hagiu and others explored platform governance, pricing structures and the strategic choice between being a neutral intermediary or a competitor to ones own participants. These ideas are highly relevant when AI agents choose which merchants or products to recommend and on what terms.

Seamless AI shopping turns the agent itself into a platform. It connects consumers, retailers, payment services, logistics providers and loyalty schemes through a conversational interface. The Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agentic Commerce Protocol can be understood as attempts to standardise interactions within this multi-sided ecosystem.^3,5 The underlying tensions – between openness and control, neutrality and self-preferencing – are illuminated by platform economics.

Behavioural economics, choice architecture and digital nudging

While traditional economics often assumes rational agents and transparent markets, the reality of digital commerce has always been shaped by design: the ordering of search results, the framing of options, the use of defaults, and the timing of prompts. Behavioural economists like Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler have demonstrated how real-world decision-making deviates from rational models and how “choice architecture” can influence outcomes.

In online retail, this has manifested as a rich literature on digital nudging: subtle interface choices that steer behaviour. Researchers in human-computer interaction and behavioural science have documented how factors such as social proof, scarcity cues and personalised messaging affect conversion.

AI-powered shopping agents add another layer. Instead of static designs, the conversation itself becomes the choice architecture. The way an AI agent frames options, in what order it presents them, how it responds to hesitation and how it explains trade-offs, all shape consumer welfare. Theorists working at the intersection of AI and behavioural economics are now grappling with questions of transparency, autonomy and manipulation in agentic environments.

Conversational AI and human-computer interaction

The ability to shop by talking to an AI depends on advances in natural language processing, dialogue modelling and user-centred design. The early work of Joseph Weizenbaum (ELIZA) and the subsequent development of chatbots provided the conceptual foundations, but the major leap came with deep learning and large language models.

Researchers such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun advanced the neural network architectures that underpin todays generative models. Within natural language processing, work by many teams on sequence-to-sequence learning, attention mechanisms and transformer architectures led to systems capable of understanding and generating human-like text.

OpenAI popularised the transformer-based large language model with the GPT series, while Google researchers contributed foundational work on transformers and later developed models like BERT and its successors. These advances turned language interfaces from novelties into robust tools capable of handling complex, multi-turn interactions.

Human-computer interaction specialists, meanwhile, studied how people form mental models of conversational agents, how trust is built or undermined, and how to design dialogues that feel helpful rather than intrusive. The combination of technical capability and design insight has made it plausible for people to rely on an AI agent to curate shopping choices.

Autonomous agents and “agentic” AI

The term “agentic commerce” used by Walmart and Google points to a broader intellectual shift: viewing AI systems not just as passive tools but as agents capable of planning and executing sequences of actions.^1,5 In classical AI, agent theory has its roots in work on autonomous systems, reinforcement learning and decision-making under uncertainty.

Reinforcement learning theorists such as Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto formalised the idea of an agent learning to act in an environment to maximise reward. In ecommerce, this can translate into systems that learn how best to present options, when to offer discounts or how to balance immediate sales with long-term customer satisfaction.

Recent research on tool-using agents goes further, allowing language models to call external APIs, interact with databases and coordinate services. In commerce settings, that means an AI can check inventory, query shipping options, apply loyalty benefits and complete payments – all within a unified reasoning loop. Googles and OpenAIs protocols effectively define the “environment” in which such agents operate and the “tools” they can use.^3,5

The theoretical questions now concern safety, alignment and control: how to ensure that commercially motivated agents act in ways that are consistent with user interests and regulatory frameworks, and how to audit their behaviour when their decision-making is both data-driven and opaque.

Corporate protagonists: Google, OpenAI and Amazon

The Associated Press quote names three central actors, each with a distinct history and strategic posture.

Google: from search to Gemini-powered commerce

Google built its business on organising the worlds information and selling targeted advertising against search queries. Its dominance in web search made it the default starting point for many online shopping journeys. As user behaviour has shifted towards conversational interfaces and specialised shopping experiences, Google has sought to extend its role from search engine to AI companion.

Gemini, Googles family of large language models and AI assistants, sits at the heart of this effort. By integrating Gemini into retail scenarios, Google is attempting to ensure that when people ask an AI for help – planning a project, solving a problem or buying a product – it is their agent, not a competitors, that orchestrates the journey.^1,3,5

Partnerships with retailers such as Walmart, Target, Shopify, Wayfair and others, combined with the Universal Commerce Protocol, are strategic levers in this competition.^1,3,4,5 They allow Google to showcase Gemini as a shopping concierge while making it easier for merchants to plug into the ecosystem without bespoke integrations for each AI platform.

OpenAI: from research lab to commerce gateway

OpenAI began as a research-focused organisation with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Over time, it has commercialised its work through APIs and flagship products such as ChatGPT, which rapidly became one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in history.

As users started to rely on ChatGPT not just for information but for planning and decision-making, the platform became an attractive entry point for commerce. OpenAIs Instant Checkout feature and the Agentic Commerce Protocol reflect an attempt to formalise this role. By enabling users to buy directly within ChatGPT from merchants on platforms like Shopify and Etsy, OpenAI is turning its assistant into a transactional hub.^2,3

In this model, the AI agent can browse catalogues, compare options and present distilled choices, collapsing the distance between advice and action. The underlying theory draws on both conversational AI and platform economics: OpenAI positions itself as a neutral interface layer connecting consumers and merchants, while also shaping how information and offers are presented.

Amazon: marketplace, infrastructure and the invisible AI layer

While the provided context focuses more explicitly on Google and OpenAI, Amazon is an equally significant player in AI-powered shopping. Its marketplace already acts as a giant, data-rich environment where search, recommendation and advertising interact.

Amazon has deployed AI across its operations: in demand forecasting, warehouse robotics, delivery routing, pricing optimisation and its Alexa voice assistant. It has also invested heavily in generative AI to enhance product search, summarise reviews and assist sellers with content creation.

From a theoretical standpoint, Amazon exemplifies the vertically integrated platform: it operates the marketplace, offers its own branded products, controls logistics and, increasingly, provides the AI services that mediate discovery. Its approach to AI shopping is therefore as much about improving internal efficiency and customer experience as about creating open protocols.

In the race described by AP, Amazons strengths lie in its end-to-end control of the commerce stack and its granular data on real-world purchasing behaviour. As conversational and agentic interfaces become more common, Amazon is well placed to embed them deeply into its existing shopping flows.

Retailers as co-architects of AI shopping

Although the quote highlights technology companies, retailers such as Walmart, Target and others are not passive recipients of AI tools. They are actively shaping how agentic commerce unfolds. Walmart, for example, has worked with both OpenAI and Google, enabling Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and integrating its catalogue and fulfilment options into Gemini.^1,2,3

Walmart executives have spoken about “rewriting the retail playbook” and closing the gap between “I want it” and “I have it” using AI.² The company has also launched its own AI assistant, Sparky, within its app, and has been candid about how AI will transform roles across its workforce.²

These moves reflect a broader theoretical insight from platform economics: large retailers must navigate their relationships with powerful technology platforms carefully, balancing the benefits of reach and innovation against the risk of ceding too much control over customer relationships. By participating in open protocols and engaging multiple AI partners, retailers seek to maintain some leverage and avoid lock-in.

Other retailers and adjacent companies are exploring similar paths. Home Depot, for instance, has adopted Gemini-based agents to provide project planning and aisle-level guidance in stores, while industrial partners like Honeywell are using AI to turn physical spaces into intelligent, sensor-rich environments.⁵ These developments blur the line between online and offline shopping, extending the idea of seamless AI-powered commerce into bricks-and-mortar settings.

The emerging theory of AI-mediated markets

As AI agents become more entwined with commerce, several theoretical threads are converging into what might be called the theory of AI-mediated markets:

• Information symmetry and asymmetry: AI agents can, in principle, reduce information overload and help consumers navigate complex choices. But they also create new asymmetries, as platform owners may know far more about aggregate behaviour than individual users.
• Algorithmic transparency and accountability: When an AI agent chooses which products to recommend, the criteria may include relevance, profit margins, sponsorship and long-term engagement. Understanding and governing these priorities is an active area of research and regulation.
• Competition and interoperability: The existence of multiple commerce protocols and agent ecosystems raises questions about interoperability, switching costs and the potential for AI-mediated markets to become more or less competitive than their predecessors.
• Personalisation versus autonomy: Enhanced personalisation can make shopping more efficient and enjoyable but may also narrow exposure to alternatives or gently steer behaviour in ways that users do not fully perceive.
• Labour and organisational change: As AI takes on more of the cognitive labour of retail – from customer service to merchandising – the roles of human workers evolve. The theoretical work on technology and labour markets gains a new frontier in AI-augmented retail operations.

Researchers from economics, computer science, law and sociology are increasingly studying these dynamics, building on the earlier theories of platforms, recommendations and behavioural biases but extending them into a world where the primary interface to the market is itself an intelligent agent.

Why this moment matters

The Associated Press quote distils a complex, multi-layered transformation into a single observation: the most powerful technology firms are in a race to define how we shop in an age of AI. The endpoint of that race is not just faster checkout or more targeted ads. It is a restructuring of the basic relationship between consumers, merchants and the digital intermediaries that connect them.

Search boxes and product grids are giving way to conversations. Static ecommerce sites are being replaced or overlaid by agents that can understand context, remember preferences and act on our behalf. The theories of information retrieval, recommendation, platforms and behavioural economics that once described separate facets of digital commerce are converging in these agents.

Understanding the backstory of this quote – the intellectual currents, corporate strategies and emerging protocols behind it – is essential for grasping the stakes of AI-powered shopping. It is not merely a technological upgrade; it is a shift in who designs, controls and benefits from the everyday journeys that connect intention to action in the digital economy.