What is Shopping with AI?

Forget clicking, start talking

Think about how you shop online right now. You open a website, click through categories, use filters, and fill out forms. It’s a visual journey, a monologue from you to a screen. But what if it could be a dialogue? A real conversation?

That is the simple, yet revolutionary core of shopping with AI. Instead of sending you to a webshop, the shop comes to you, in the form of a smart assistant. This ‘agent’ acts as your personal shopper who helps you, advises you, and handles the purchase for you, all within a chat.

Why we need rules of the game

To make this run smoothly and securely, the assistant and the webshop need to speak the same language. They need a set of technical rules, a ‘protocol’. These rules provide clarity on three important things:

• The Product Catalog: How should a webshop present its products so that an assistant can ‘read’ and understand them?
• The Checkout: What steps must the assistant follow to create, modify, and securely pay for an order?
• The Security: How do we know for sure that the assistant is who it says it is and that no fraud is being committed?

De ACP flow in de praktijk

De algemene agentic commerce flow

Who makes the rules?

Right now, there are two major players setting the rules: OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) and Google. They each have their own vision, which we explain in our comparison between the approaches of Google and OpenAI.

The good news? As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to dive deep into the technical details. The market is maturing. Major platforms like Shopify are already making it possible for their webshops to connect. It’s a clear signal that this is becoming the new standard.

The best strategy, therefore, is to ensure your system is flexible and ready for what’s to come. The question is no longer if this will happen, but how you ensure you are ready for it.