The Tamesis
But when this fully autonomous technology does exist, one of its biggest applications is expected to be making online purchases on behalf of consumers. For tech companies hosting these end-to-end AI buying journeys, there’s a lot of money to be made through new in-chat advertising models and hosted in-platform transactions.
So it’s no surprise that Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity are racing to release new shopping-focused features to prepare their AI chatbots for the arrival of these agents. Google becomes the latest company to announce integrated checkout in its AI model, following moves by Perplexity and OpenAI in late 2025. One important thing all these AI platform announcements have in common is a partnership with Shopify.
As consumers increasingly turn to AI search for shopping, technology and marketing teams have been scrambling to relaunch their brands’ DTC sites and optimize their product description pages based on the emerging practice of AIO (artificial intelligence optimization). Interestingly, Finkelstein said Shopify has moved more legacy brands to the platform in the past few months than in five years. This paradigm shift will also change the way brands are discovered online, having an impact on advertising budgets and how they are spent on platforms like Google and Meta.
Shopify has helped fuel the retail direct-to-consumer brand boom, making it cheaper and easier for anyone to set up an online store. Now, Finkelstein sees its role as driving the era of artificial intelligence shopping. “They realize it’s not like you can say you don’t do social commerce. You can’t really say you don’t do artificial intelligence,” Finkelstein predicted. “You need to work with partners who are laying those foundations for agent AI because you can’t opt out.”
Performance-based brand equity outperforms pay-to-play
In addition to launching a new agency commerce UCP with Shopify, Google this week became the first major AI platform to introduce advertising in AI chat, through a pilot of personalized “direct offers” that brands and advertisers can set up for shoppers in Google’s AI mode. It also announced a new feature that will allow brands to integrate brand “business agents” into Google’s AI-powered searches. Retailers like Poshmark and Reebok are already using the feature to help brands customize how they answer shoppers’ product questions with their brand’s voice.
Previously, Amazon introduced sponsored prompts in its AI assistant Rufus in late 2025, allowing brands to bid on follow-up questions in AI conversations as consumers shop. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI is reportedly testing different in-chat advertising models, which CEO Sam Altman promises will be “thoughtful and tasteful,” but the startup has had to build it all from scratch, while Google and Amazon both have well-established advertising consoles.
“When people talk to an AI answer engine, they will expect to get a product that the AI ’agent’ thinks is best for them personally. They don’t want to see ads, so brands will likely need to prompt people in follow-up prompts to consider unique qualities they can pay for,” said Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI. “Luxury brands currently have a lack of understanding of how all this technology works, so giving them these off-the-shelf products to plug and play through platforms like Shopify works well.”
