🛒 AI is quietly becoming the new shopping layer

Shopping is now the third-most-used AI application, according to an Epsilon research report.

But there’s a huge gap in how people use it: 42% of surveyed shoppers use AI to compare prices, while only 16% let AI finalize a purchase.

That 26-point gap could be the biggest opportunity in agentic commerce.

The shift is already showing up in the numbers. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to merchants grew 8× year over year in Q1 2026, while orders from AI-powered searches rose nearly 13%. Buyers arriving through AI channels were also ordering at almost twice the rate of other channels.

Shopify is connecting Shop Pay to Meta’s Muse, giving outside AI agents a path into its commerce infrastructure.

Amazon is taking the opposite approach, blocking dozens of third-party shopping agents, including ChatGPT, while pushing shoppers toward its own AI assistant, Rufus.

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