Technology is moving fast, with artificial intelligence, everything else will move fast. Markets, which is at the center of it all, will move fast.
As a result, end users will have to rely on solutions that equally moves fast. When it comes to commerce, shopping agents are those solutions.
Shopping agents are AI-powered robots that autonomously purchase goods (and services) for users.
Agentic commerce is a future that some might struggle to understand. People wonder why they'd want AI agents handling their purchases because they judge it all by the constraints of commerce within old tech, not by what can be as artificial intelligence comes into the picture.
Also, they look to the fact that buying something is just a click of a few buttons, so why need an agent to click said buttons?
AI agents are expected to move as much as $30 trillion by 2030, the reason isn't because humans will be too lazy to put 4 digit codes to authorize transactions, it will be everything else before that.
Have in mind, future economies will largely be agentic. Manufacturing/production, demands, supplying, payments, delivery, every process will have AI embedded to scale.
So when someone says: why would I need AI to do this or that, they focus on the last-stage action and ignore everything else.
Like traveling to London by air, everyone just focuses on getting on the plane, they are not responsible for building it, testing it, maintaining it, or even flying it, they just have to get on it.
We can also judge the act of sending emails, nobody cares about the backend stuff, so they consider that it's all been a simple task.
But none of it is truly simple.
Why need a shopping agent? You don't need it to press the buy button, you need it to scout the internet for the best offers on what you need to buy, present analysis if necessary, find discount coupons that you'd spend hours manually searching for.
While purchasing rights (access to funds and authority to make transactions) can be pre-granted, in a lot of cases, you'll be responsible for the purchase being authorized in the moment.
For the digital world, agents will mostly be frontends we use to get things done faster. And in the real world, they will be machines or physical tools that can carry out tasks on command.
Latest report on Shopify shows a growing use of agents in commerce.
E-commerce software provider Shopify is bullish on AI-powered shopping agents, citing AI as an “incredible tool” to enable more entrepreneurs and calling it the “biggest shift in technology since the internet” during its third-quarter earnings call. The company, which partnered with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in September, reported that traffic from AI tools to its online stores is up 7x since January of this year, and purchases attributed to AI-powered search have increased by 11x.
TechCrunch report | November 4, 2025
People are beginning to see the appeal of doing more in less time. Agents will dominate web traffic and most digital transactions will be carried out by agents. Browsers and apps will be about interacting with agents, making discovering quicker and execution swift, low-cost and rewarding.
A decade or two from now, AI will be a critical piece of every system, and from here, scaling is what businesses and the world will be discussing, not debates on integration and use.
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