Generative AI primarily changes an app's user interface, but agentic AI can bypass UIs entirely to complete tasks. This makes transaction-fulfillment apps, which constitute a huge portion of the market, vulnerable to being replaced by agents that act directly on a user's behalf.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein argues that while AI will rewrite user interfaces, it won't replace core transaction infrastructure. Shopify's defensibility comes from its comprehensive back-office system managing inventory, taxes, payments, and fraud, which is far harder to replicate than a simple storefront.

AI agents shop based on optimized specs, not human heuristics like brand trust. This shift to "agentic commerce" could neutralize the power of major brands like Walmart and Amazon, and eliminate the interpersonal relationships that sustain local, small businesses.

Shopify's Harley Finkelstein argues agentic commerce will make SEO obsolete. Instead of brands gaming search rankings, AI will recommend products based on merit and a user's personal context history. This shift could level the playing field, allowing smaller, high-quality brands to be discovered more easily.

While AI shopping agents promise to protect consumer privacy by abstracting away direct retailer relationships, this is a false dawn. Power will likely centralize with the major tech companies providing these agents, not empower individual users with decentralized control. The battle for "owning the customer" simply moves to a new layer.

The primary financial risk of agentic commerce to e-commerce companies is not the transaction fee but the potential loss of high-margin retail media advertising revenue. Since many retailers derive most or all of their profit from on-site ads, agents threaten their core business model.

SaaS products like Salesforce won't be easily ripped out. The real danger is that new AI agents will operate across all SaaS tools, becoming the primary user interface and capturing the next wave of value. This relegates existing SaaS platforms to a lower, less valuable infrastructure layer.

Just as newspapers ceded their audience to Google for traffic, retailers are being tempted to let AI chatbots handle customer interactions. This trade sacrifices brand identity and direct customer relationships for short-term volume—a historically catastrophic move that leads to commoditization by an aggregator.

Even as AI agents shift product discovery away from traditional websites, Shopify remains essential. Its core value lies in managing the complex post-purchase lifecycle—returns, shipping, order tracking, and customer data—making it a centralized operational hub that new discovery channels still rely on.