Will AI Agents Do Your Shopping?.
The infrastructure for agent-led shopping arrived in a single quarter: protocols, payment rails, and checkout inside ChatGPT. The open question is whether consumers actually delegate the purchase.
In brief
Not yet at scale. AI agents influenced roughly 20% of global online holiday spending in 2025, but purchases completed end-to-end by an agent remain a small fraction of sales. Our prediction requires a major retailer to attribute more than 5% of online sales to agentic checkout, and that bar has not been cleared.
The Prediction
A major retailer reports >5% of online sales from agentic checkout as AI agent ad spend hits $5B.
How real is agentic commerce?
The rails were built fast. In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, letting US users buy from Etsy sellers in the chat itself, with more than a million Shopify merchants to follow, and open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol it built with Stripe so any merchant or developer can plug in.
The demand signal followed within a quarter. Salesforce's holiday tracking attributed $262 billion of the $1.29 trillion in global online holiday sales, about 20%, to AI and agent influence, and found that shoppers arriving from AI channels converted roughly nine times more often than social media referrals.
Those two facts describe different things, and the difference is the whole question. Influence means a model helped someone decide. Agentic checkout means the agent completed the purchase. The first is already mainstream; the second is still a sliver of transactions.
Why did we predict a 5% breakthrough?
The 2025 State of AI Report argued that commerce was the most natural first market for consumer agents: high purchase intent, structured catalogs, and payment rails that card networks and processors were already rebuilding for machine customers.
The prediction deliberately set a hard, public number. Five percent of a major retailer's online sales through agentic checkout is the difference between a feature and a channel. The paired condition, $5 billion of AI agent ad spend, tests whether a real market forms around influencing agents the way one formed around influencing search results.
What would count as a hit?
The clean evidence is a major retailer stating, in earnings, an investor letter, or a holiday recap, that more than 5% of online sales came through agentic checkout: purchases completed by an agent, not merely assisted by AI search.
The advertising half is harder to grade because no public tracker of agent ad spend exists yet. Credible third-party estimates putting the category at $5 billion would clear it. Conflating AI-influenced revenue with agent-completed revenue would not, and retailers have every incentive to blur that line.
Why it matters
Whoever owns the agent owns the demand. If checkout moves inside the conversation, product discovery collapses into model answers, and the retailer's relationship with the customer runs through someone else's assistant.
Retailers face the platform dilemma in its purest form: integrate and give up the customer relationship, or resist and give up the sale. The advertising market restructures around the same shift, from persuading people to being retrievable and preferred by agents.
What we are watching now
We are watching retailer earnings calls for the first hard agentic-checkout disclosures, adoption of the Agentic Commerce Protocol and rival agent-payment standards, and whether ChatGPT commerce expands from single-item purchases into carts, comparisons, and repeat orders.
On the advertising side, the signal is a real product: paid placement or sponsored eligibility inside agent recommendations, priced at scale. This prediction is graded in the State of AI Report 2026, publishing in October.
Frequently Asked Questions
What share of online sales do AI agents actually drive?
Salesforce attributed about 20% of global online holiday sales in 2025, $262 billion, to AI and agent influence. Sales completed end-to-end by an agent are far smaller and not yet publicly broken out by any major retailer, which is exactly what our prediction waits for.
What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol?
An open standard, built by OpenAI and Stripe and released in September 2025, that lets AI agents complete purchases from merchants without the merchant rebuilding its backend. It powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.
When will this prediction be graded?
In the State of AI Report 2026, published in October 2026. The verdict and its justification will appear on the public predictions scorecard.