Last week I asked ChatGPT to find a vacuum cleaner for me. Not through Google, not through Amazon. Just in a chat window. I typed: "I'm looking for a cordless stick vacuum, quiet, for a small apartment, budget up to 200 euros." Within three minutes I had a buying guide with four options, including prices, reviews and a clear comparison. I didn't have to visit a single webshop.
That sounds like a neat trick. But it is the start of something bigger. Much bigger.
TL;DR The way people shop online is changing fundamentally. AI agents will increasingly search, compare and eventually pay for products on behalf of consumers. Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI is building shopping features into ChatGPT, and Bol announced its own AI shopping assistant. For webshops, the competition shifts from "being found" to "being selected by a machine". Your design or your brand will no longer determine your success — the quality of your product data will.
What is agentic commerce, really?
Let me start with a definition anyone can grasp. Agentic commerce means an AI agent shops on your behalf. You describe what you need. The AI figures it out, compares options, and in some cases can even complete the purchase. You no longer have to search, filter and click yourself.
McKinsey describes it as AI that anticipates consumer needs, explores options, negotiates deals and executes transactions. Morgan Stanley estimates that agentic commerce could account for 190 to 385 billion dollars in US e-commerce spending alone by 2030. That is 10 to 20 percent of all online sales.
Let that sink in: we are talking about a market that is currently almost zero.
The "shopping research" feature in ChatGPT
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, you don't have to look far. OpenAI launched the "shopping research" feature in ChatGPT in late 2025. It works simply. You describe what you're looking for. ChatGPT asks follow-up questions about your budget, preferences and situation. In the background it searches the internet, compares prices, checks reviews and delivery times. After a few minutes you get a personal buying guide with the best options side by side.
What makes this special: those recommendations are not advertisements. OpenAI says product selection is independent and not influenced by commercial partnerships. If you have memory enabled in ChatGPT, the suggestions are even tailored to your earlier conversations. Does ChatGPT know you're a gamer? Then it factors that into a laptop recommendation.
At ShopTalk 2026 last week, OpenAI announced further extensions: richer visual results, side-by-side product comparisons, and image-based search. The direction is clear. ChatGPT doesn't just want to be your knowledge base, it wants to be your personal buyer.
There is a caveat. OpenAI's first attempt to also let the checkout happen inside ChatGPT, Instant Checkout, has been scaled back. Walmart reported that conversion was three times lower for purchases made directly in ChatGPT than when customers were forwarded to the retailer's own site. Forrester analyst Emily Pfeiffer summed it up well: the entire ecosystem is still young, and nobody has really figured this out yet. But that the direction is set, no one doubts anymore.
Google throws an open standard at it
Google is not sitting still. At the National Retail Federation conference in January 2026, CEO Sundar Pichai presented the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP. That is an open standard that allows AI agents to communicate with webshops. Search product catalogs, check inventory, compare prices, and ultimately complete payment.
The consortium behind UCP reads like a who's who of retail: Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, Wayfair, Zalando, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Adyen, Best Buy. They have all signed on. That is not just a technical standard. It is an agreement about what the future shopping experience will look like.
Google simultaneously launched the Business Agent: an AI assistant that lets shoppers chat directly with brands inside Google Search, as if they were in a store. And in Merchant Center, dozens of new data attributes became available, specifically designed for conversational commerce.
Google's message is clear. The search results page as we know it, with ten blue links, is being replaced by something fundamentally different. An AI that chooses for you.
Bol and Coolblue: what are the Dutch players doing?
The big question for Dutch e-commerce is of course: how are our own platforms responding?
Bol announced a store-wide Shopper Agent at the Webwinkel Vakdagen this week. CEO Maite Zubiaurre presented "Billie", an AI assistant that will help customers across all product categories. You will soon be able to tell Billie: "Order Starbucks capsules for me", and the agent will handle it. Zubiaurre was candid: assortment, price and delivery time become radically transparent through AI. Context becomes more important than ever, because consumers search for products that fit a specific situation.
Coolblue is also going in hard. In 2025, CEO Pieter Zwart announced that the company would deploy 150 AI agents for product advice. That fits Coolblue's DNA: everything is about helping the customer make the right choice. But there is a paradox here. Coolblue has built its entire brand on user experience. The beautiful website. The personal delivery service. The reviews with a smile. But an AI agent doesn't see that smile. It sees product attributes, delivery times and return policies.
The shift no one sees coming
And this is the heart of the story. The shift to agentic commerce doesn't play out on the screen you see. It plays out in the layers underneath.
What an AI agent evaluates when selecting a product on your behalf differs completely from what you as a human look at. An agent doesn't look at your homepage design or your campaign visuals. It looks at structured product data: specifications, stock status, delivery time, return conditions, reviews. If that information is missing or not machine-readable, you simply don't exist in the agent's world.
That is a major shift. UX moves from interface to information. Not how you display it, but what you make available determines your success.
And it goes beyond data alone. The classic marketing funnel, from orientation through comparison to conversion, collapses. There are fewer moments where you as a brand can influence the customer. The consumer no longer comes to your website to browse. The AI does the browsing, and presents only the end result.
From ranking to selection
This is perhaps the most important shift to understand. In the world of Google, everything was about ranking. Position 1, 2, 3. You paid for clicks, optimised for keywords, fought for the best spot on the page.
In the world of agentic commerce, it's about selection. The AI doesn't present ten options. It presents one, two, at most three. That selection is based on multiple factors at once: relevance to the situation, reliability of your offer, completeness of your data, and your track record on delivery and returns.
So you no longer compete on a single dimension. Price alone won't cut it. Position won't either. You compete on everything at the same time. And small errors in your data can cause you to fall completely outside the selection.
For sites that still lean on classic SEO, this is a fundamental shift. In an earlier piece I wrote about the impact of AI Overviews on your visibility (opent in nieuw venster). Agentic commerce is the logical next step: from a summarising AI at the top of search results, to an AI that takes the choosing off your plate entirely.
OpenAI runs into reality
I want to be honest about where things stand. Because agentic commerce is not a finished story. It is a promise under construction, and some promises are already being adjusted.
OpenAI's Instant Checkout was the showpiece: buying products without leaving ChatGPT. But it didn't go to plan. Of the million Shopify merchants that should have signed on, only about thirty were available after months. Product information was often outdated. Prices didn't match. Inventory wasn't current. The complexity of real-time e-commerce (taxes, returns, fraud prevention) turned out to be immense.
OpenAI has now switched to a model where you are forwarded from ChatGPT to retailer apps. Less sexy, but more workable. And honestly: it fits reality better. Consumers are happy to use AI for research, but still want to handle checkout themselves on a trusted site.
That doesn't change the direction. It just tells us the road there is bumpy. As one Forrester analyst put it: everyone thinks the other has figured it out, but nobody has actually figured it out.
How this will develop
Let me share my own assessment of how this will play out over the next two to three years.
In the short term, this year and next, I expect AI agents to mainly take over the research part of the customer journey. Product comparison, summarising reviews, picking the best option. The actual checkout will for now remain on the retailer's own website. That fits what we see today: consumers trust AI for advice, but not yet with their credit card.
In the medium term, towards 2028, I expect standards like UCP to mature. Agents will then be able to actually complete transactions, first for simple repeat purchases (groceries, household products) and later for more complex categories. The category matters: you'll trust an agent with a pack of detergent sooner than with a new sofa.
In the long term, 2030 and beyond, the entire architecture of online retail changes. The webshop becomes less a place where customers come, and more a back-end infrastructure that serves agents. Your homepage becomes less important than your API. Your brand becomes less important than your data.
That is incidentally also the paradox for platforms like Bol and Coolblue. Their strength now lies in the customer relationship. But if the first interaction goes through ChatGPT or Google's AI, they become dependent on a layer they don't control. First-party data (your own customer data, your own purchase history) then becomes your strategic anchor. Those who exploit it well can keep the relationship. Those who neglect it become a fulfilment factory.
What should you do differently tomorrow?
If you run a webshop, or if you're responsible for the digital strategy of a retailer, there are a few things you can already do now.
First: treat your product data as your most important asset. Not your campaigns, not your design. Your data. Are your product descriptions complete? Is your stock data current? Are your delivery times reliable? Do you have structured data (schema.org markup) on your product pages?
Second: let the AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and give OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot access to your product pages. If you block them, you don't exist.
Third: think in situations, not in keywords. Don't optimise your product content for "best vacuum 2026" but for "quiet cordless vacuum for small apartment". That is the kind of question someone asks an AI agent.
And finally: accept that you lose control over part of the customer journey, and invest all the more in the part you do control. Your own channels, your own customer data, your own service after the purchase.
The bigger picture
We are moving from a world where you had to be visible, to a world where you are selected. That is not the same. Visibility you could buy with ads. Selection you have to earn with data, reliability and relevance.
In the coming years, a new layer will form between the consumer and the webshop. A layer of AI agents that decide on behalf of the customer. Those who understand and anticipate that layer have an advantage. Those who wait until it is mainstream will discover the agents have long passed them by.
And it starts today. With a simple question to ChatGPT: "Find me a vacuum cleaner."