Anticipating a shift to "agentic commerce," SharkNinja is actively re-optimizing its e-commerce site for Large Language Models. The company believes what drives human conversion today may not rank highest in AI-driven search and expects commerce via AI platforms to be meaningful by Christmas 2025.

For OpenAI's commerce features to succeed, it's not enough to build one-click checkout. They must fundamentally retrain hundreds of millions of users to trust a new purchasing workflow inside a chatbot, breaking deeply ingrained habits of searching on ChatGPT then buying on Google or Amazon.

Stripe avoids costly system rebuilds by treating its new payments foundation model as a modular component. Its powerful embeddings are simply added as new features to many existing ML classifiers, instantly boosting their performance with minimal engineering effort.

Agentic commerce isn't just a substitute for existing online shopping. It can unlock new spending from high-income individuals whose primary barrier to consumption is time, not money. By automating purchasing, agents reduce this "time cost of consumption," potentially adding new, incremental dollars to the economy.

To enable agentic e-commerce while mitigating risk, major card networks are exploring how to issue credit cards directly to AI agents. These cards would have built-in limitations, such as spending caps (e.g., $200), allowing agents to execute purchases autonomously within safe financial guardrails.

OpenAI's partnership with Stripe to enable in-app purchases transforms ChatGPT from an information tool into a transactional platform. This creates a frictionless sales channel for e-commerce brands, directly challenging Google's established search-to-purchase business model.

Agentic AI will evolve into a 'multi-agent ecosystem.' This means AI agents from different companies—like an airline and a hotel—will interact directly with each other to autonomously solve a customer's complex problem, freeing humans from multi-party coordination tasks.

Stripe intentionally designed its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to be provider-agnostic, working with any payments processor and any AI agent. This strategic decision to build an open standard, rather than a proprietary product, aims to grow the entire agentic commerce ecosystem instead of creating a walled garden.

The financial system is unprepared for the coming wave of AI agents. These agents will perform tasks and require payment, creating trillions of micropayments. Current infrastructure from Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard cannot handle this volume, creating a massive opportunity for new protocols to facilitate the 'agent economy'.