What you’ll learn:
Cyber Week 2025 was the tipping point: AI shifted from browsing to buying. The breakneck speed of AI development promises to revolutionize the commerce ecosystem.
For example, Amazon Rufus is driving $10 billion in annualized sales. Walmart and Target launched on ChatGPT Instant Checkout. Google deployed “Buy for me” buttons across its search engine. Mastercard’s Agent Pay went live in the UAE. These are no longer chatbots that assist — these are autonomous agents that execute.
And Visa’s 450% spike in dark-web AI fraud tools confirms the stakes: The digital shelf is now a high-speed negotiation floor.
Without agent-ready infrastructure, your products risk being overlooked when AI agents shop on behalf of consumers. Legacy platforms built for human clicks cannot support the machine-readable catalogs, real-time inventory APIs and protocol-driven negotiations (ACP, AP2) that this new commerce layer demands.
commercetools’ agentic offering — AI Hub and Agent Gateway — ensures your catalog is discoverable and your transactions executable within seconds of an agent’s query.
Merchants that chose composable architecture have proof that, once again, this investment has paid off. While competitors scramble to retrofit rigid systems, your infrastructure is structurally ready for agent-mediated commerce. Your next step isn’t re-platforming — it’s turning the key.
Let’s take a look at the latest agentic developments in the market between November and early December 2025 — and the implications they have for your business.
Sellers and merchants
With customers seeking faster and more intuitive ways to shop, sellers and merchants are embracing agentic commerce to meet the moment. Examples include:
Newegg
Integrated PayPal’s agentic services, enabling autonomous product discovery and purchase execution directly within AI shopping environments like Perplexity and OpenAI.
Walmart
Launched ChatGPT Instant Checkout integration before Cyber Monday, enabling US customers to purchase products directly within ChatGPT via the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
Target
Released ChatGPT app for fresh food ordering, becoming a major retailer supporting autonomous AI agent shopping with full protocol-driven integration.
Liverpool
Mexico’s largest department store partnered with commercetools to deploy AI Hub and Agent Gateway, enabling the integration of product data with ChatGPT via ACP while maintaining governance and security over how AI tools access the department store’s product catalog.
The implications
Customer engagement and discovery
Across the industry, companies are rapidly embracing agentic AI to transform how customers discover products, receive personalized recommendations and complete purchases with minimal friction.
Amazon Rufus
Black Friday data showed Rufus-involved purchase sessions surged 100% compared to trailing averages, with daily conversion increasing 75% year-over-year. The company reported a $10 billion incremental annualized sales projection, with 250 million users, and agentic auto-buying capabilities enabling Prime members to set price targets for autonomous purchase execution.
Perplexity
Launched free shopping experience with conversational product discovery, personalized product cards and instant checkout powered by PayPal.
OpenAI
Introduced shopping research in ChatGPT using GPT-5 mini, with future integration to Instant Checkout for ACP-enabled merchants.
Launched agentic checkout on Search and Gemini with “Buy for me” functionality live for Wayfair, Chewy and select Shopify merchants.
Instacart
Launched Cart Assistant for personalized meal planning and recommendations, piloting smart carts and partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Instacart is partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google to shape next-generation agent-powered grocery shopping.
The implications
Payments, trust and fraud
As agentic commerce accelerates, the payments ecosystem is being reshaped by new transaction protocols, rising fraud threats and an urgent need for agent-level trust infrastructure.
Mastercard
Announced Agent Pay launch across Latin America and the Caribbean beginning in 2026. In addition, Mastercard launched Agent Pay pilot in the UAE with Majid Al Futtaim, completing the first agentic transaction outside the US, enabling cardholders to use AI agents for search, discovery and transactions. This includes VOX Cinemas ticket booking, with US rollout to all issuers completed in November 2025 and global rollout planned for early 2026.
Checkout.com
Officially adopted ACP, enabling merchants to securely accept payments initiated by autonomous AI agents.
PayPal
Enabled PayPal merchants to become discoverable within Perplexity through agentic commerce services, including store sync and agent-ready, with identity verification, Purchase and Seller protection, and fraud detection for AI-driven transactions.
Visa
Flagged rapidly escalating fraud risks as agentic commerce takes hold, reporting a 450% spike in dark-web activity around AI agent fraud tools. The company has recorded significant increases in bot-based payment attacks, underscoring the urgent need for Know Your Agent (KYA) verification infrastructure and specialized fraud detection systems to distinguish legitimate autonomous shopping agents from malicious automated systems.
Stripe
Announced adoption and first live deployments of ACP for ChatGPT Instant Checkout for enabling agent-authorized transactions at scale with real-world merchant adoption (Etsy, Shopify and additional brands).
The implications
Agentic infrastructure
Leading AI platforms are rapidly building the infrastructure to support agentic commerce at scale, enabling secure, interoperable and auditable interactions between autonomous agents, merchants and payment systems.
OpenAI
ACP entered live production, supporting real agent-to-agent commercial flows at scale, enabling seamless interoperability between ChatGPT, Stripe and merchant systems.
Perplexity
Announced rollout of free agentic shopping product for US users, enabling autonomous AI agents to execute product discovery and purchase transactions through integration with PayPal payment infrastructure.
Deployed agentic checkout infrastructure across Search and Gemini with Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) alignment, enabling autonomous AI agents to execute multi-step commerce workflows directly without GenAI channel restrictions or human re-verification.
Anthropic
Announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration with the GWI insights platform, enabling Claude to access representative, bias-checked audience data directly within AI chatbot conversations.
The implications
Don’t navigate the AI momentum alone. Contact our experts to start your agentic commerce now.
Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of commercetools. Founder of the headless commerce concept. Pioneer of cloud software in the enterprise market. Dad to three little rockers. Beach volleyball player, passionate mountain biker, and wannabe surfer.