By late 2025, AI’s influence on commerce will be pronounced, reshaping key aspects of how products are discovered, evaluated, and purchased. It is more difficult than ever to keep up with the evolving shopping landscape, in large part because of the impact AI is beginning to have. The rise of personalized AI agents, autonomous purchasing systems, and generative interfaces will shift shopping from manual clicks to intelligent conversations, context-aware recommendations, and automated decisions.
Four futuristic trends are now becoming realities:
1. AI Dictates Discovery, Eroding Search’s Impact
For the better part of the last three decades, consumers have relied upon search engines to find products. Now, with tools like ChatGPT offering shopping features, users can describe what they want and get tailored recommendations, without scrolling through ads or multiple search results. Take a look through Reddit debates about the advantages of ChatGPT versus traditional search and you’ll see the stickiness that these AI models have on consumers is growing steadily.
These AI assistants refine recommendations based on prior interactions, whether through remembered user preferences (as with ChatGPT’s memory) or direct access to past purchase behavior in commerce platforms like Amazon.
2. Agents Enable The Buy Button
Visa and Mastercard are exploring AI-enabled payment systems designed to streamline purchases, allowing AI agents to initiate transactions with user-set parameters. And PayPal announced its plan to build a Financial Operating System tailored for AI agents. These tools can handle everything from buying groceries to booking travel with minimal input from the user.
For brands, this means that the traditional sales funnel is no longer linear or manual. The key moment is now upstream, when the AI chooses what to suggest before the shopper is even aware of a need.
3. The New Loyalty Is Relevance
AI-driven shopping doesn’t eliminate brand-building, but it expands the audience requirements. Brands now need to appeal to humans and the AI agents filtering information and enabling buying actions. That requires clean, structured product data including pricing, availability, robust attributes, and reviews, ensuring it’s easily accessible to AI systems through feeds, APIs, or direct platform integrations.
When AI agents can easily parse this data, they can surface timely, personalized recommendations that drive utility such as reminding parents to restock baby formula or suggesting outfits for an upcoming event. In this new landscape, loyalty stems from that kind of usefulness.
4. What’s Old Is New Again: Native Ads And Affiliate Programs Will Power Monetization
As AI agents guide more shopping decisions, platforms will likely monetize through integrated affiliate links and sponsored product placements. Rather than display ads or promoted search results, these systems will embed product recommendations directly into conversations, presented as helpful suggestions, not interruptions.
Some platforms, like Perplexity, are currently experimenting with new ad formats, such as sponsored follow-up questions and contextual media placed alongside answers. While some of these resemble display in layout, they aim to feel more integrated and utility-driven.
The long-term trend favors native monetization, earning revenue through contextually relevant suggestions rather than distractions. Platforms can profit through affiliate partnerships, especially as AI agents become central to the shopping journey. Systems that surface recommended products based on robust data integration and strong alignment with user preferences will create outsized advantage. When an AI suggests a product mid-conversation, it creates a new, premium form of ad inventory: personalized, embedded, and closer to the point of conversion than ever before.
What Marketers Should Do
As AI reshapes online shopping, marketers must communicate effectively with both people and machines. Here’s how to stay ahead in the second half of 2025:
- Test the AI shopping experience yourself. Start your next online purchase by using an AI platform like ChatGPT or Perplexity to discover and then narrow your product choices into the consideration phase. Observe how you search, and evaluate. Use that experience to understand how and when consumers will engage in similar journeys.
- Optimize for AI discovery. As AI agents increasingly influence purchasing decisions, ensuring your content is structured for machine comprehension is crucial. Start by implementing schema markup and prioritizing structured data formats that AI systems can easily parse. Avoid hidden text or dynamic rendering that AI agents may overlook, and provide comprehensive product feeds to marketplaces and AI-integrated platforms to maintain visibility in AI-driven searches.
- Create trust with both humans and agents. Ensure your brand appears reliably across the web with transparent, structured data that highlights product details, values, and policies. Strengthen this through third party expert reviews, credible media mentions, and authentic customer feedback to reinforce trust signals that AI agents rely on when recommending products.
AI influencing commerce has significant downstream implications in commerce, from technology stacks to the future of commerce media to advertising formats in AI. For an even more comprehensive exploration into the strategic shifts marketers must consider, check out Brands Need to Stand Out as Bots Begin Buying.
As AI-driven commerce evolves, the brands that succeed will not only deliver quality products but also master the nuances of AI optimization. In a landscape where algorithms increasingly shape purchasing decisions, visibility and relevance are no longer just marketing priorities, they’re business imperatives.
