The agentic shopping wars are here, just in time for the holidays
It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but holiday shopping season is still a stress test — finding the perfect gifts, juggling shipping deadlines and staying on budget. Enter AI shopping assistants, which promise to ease pressure by recommending products and even buying gifts on your behalf. Sounds great, right? Well, not everyone agrees.
Amazon is now suing Perplexity over its agentic shopping tool, turning what could have been a season of convenience into a high-stakes battle over who gets to shape — and profit from — the future of shopping.
Consumers are intrigued but skeptical
Shoppers seem to have mixed feelings about the role AI should play in their shopping habits.
Half of Gen Z and millennial shoppers would let AI buy gifts on their behalf to reduce stress, according to a recent Harris Poll and Mastercard global survey. But the most popular use for AI among surveyed shoppers was receiving personalized recommendations.
Other research showed similar hesitation. A Salesforce survey found that 71% of respondents worldwide want AI to answer questions for faster customer service, while only 47% said they’d want it to purchase recommended products.
The rise of AI shopping assistants (and the legal battles)
AI shopping assistants are here — and so are the tensions they create.
Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity accuses the company of accessing user accounts and disguising its AI tool as human activity. Perplexity fired back in a blog post titled “Bullying is Not Innovation,” claiming Amazon is trying to “eliminate user rights so that it can sell more ads…”
Industry analysts note that if AI agents shop for consumers, then Amazon’s “ads lose visibility and their value could decline.”
Yet, recent data indicates a lift in sales associated with Amazon’s own chatbot on Black Friday — suggesting the company is perfectly OK with people using AI in their shopping routine as long as it happens within its ecosystem.
Or, as Rick Stallings, global chief data officer at Croud, put it: “Amazon is defending its identity graph, the engine behind its entire ads business.”
“If AI agents become the front door to shopping, loyalty shifts to the agent and Amazon loses the intent signals its spent decades building,” he told The Current. “The power moves back to the consumer — and Amazon loses its hold on product suppliers.”
Do consumers trust AI agents with their wallet?
Perplexity wrote that when an AI assistant visits a website, “it does so with your credentials, your permissions, and your rights. (It’s also unable to do anything you can’t).”
But how comfortable are consumers with that, really? According to an EMarketer report, just 24% of U.S. consumers are OK sharing data with an AI shopping tool.
Yet, shoppers are also three times more likely to trust a retailer’s own on-site AI agent than a third-party one, according to a recent Bain & Company report.
“AI isn’t just a commerce engine — it’s a chance to give humans real cognitive freedom,” Stallings said. “And in that world, brand reputation still wins. Whether an assistant is involved or not, people default to the brands they trust.”
How retailers and advertisers should respond
Mixed sentiment aside, experts say AI-driven shopping is inevitable. How should retailers and advertisers respond?
“[Retailers] should bolster the trust and services that still make a difference in consumers’ minds,” Bain & Company partners wrote in Harvard Business Review.
That includes owning “the payment, shipping and data relationship when possible.”
Aaron Cheris, a partner in Bain & Company’s retail practice, told The Current that advertisers could shift their media spend from sponsored search listings to other parts of the shopping journey, such as “during the conversion processes that will still mostly happen on retail site or off-site placements.”
“Additionally, leading retail media networks are already testing new ad products like sponsored prompts which should drive a premium and attract advertiser dollars,” Cheris added.
Some retailers are partnering with AI companies, such as Target, which is integrating its shopping app into ChatGPT.
“Visibility inside the large-language model matters more than visibility on the shelf,” he said. “Sitting out means disappearing from the consumer’s consideration set entirely.”
Cheris concurred: “It’s better to be where the customers are spending time versus being an avoider and better to set terms that are acceptable now before the power dynamic may require less favorable deals later. You cannot be chosen if you are not on the platform where people are doing their looking.”