Walmart's checkout inside ChatGPT converted three times worse than its own website. It opened the door to AI agents anyway.
Why retailers open or close the door to AI shopping agents depends on where their profit sits, and what that means for the brands on their shelves.
Read briefing →Agentic AI Isn't Just About What It Can Do. It's About What We Can Trust It to Do.
The Agentic Finance Summit in Singapore highlighted a shift from building capable agents to building the conditions in which they can be trusted to act. For commerce, that means connecting discovery, selection and execution with reliable data, clear authority and accountable infrastructure.
Read briefing →The AI shelf changes with the question
A piece I wrote for AdNews: we tested three established Australian appliance retailers in AI recommendations. The most striking result came from a retailer that wasn't in the competitive set at all — Appliances Online was named in 99% of answers. The AI shelf is query-led, which makes the competitive set fluid.
Read briefing →Brands Can't Manufacture Cultural Relevance. They Have to Earn It.
Attention is only the first step. Across All That Matters in Singapore, conversations on F1, campaign translation and collaboration explored how brands earn relevance by understanding what people care about and finding a meaningful way to contribute.
Read briefing →Two AI Conversations: What Australia and Singapore Are Telling Me About the Next Phase of Transformation
Australia's AI conversation is about transforming the organisation; Singapore's is about what AI makes possible as infrastructure. The missing layer is commercial: AI doesn't just change how companies work, it changes how markets work — and how customers discover, evaluate, choose and buy.
Read briefing →93% of AI Investment Is Going Into Technology. The Harder Part Is the People Around It.
93% of AI investment is going into technology. Just 7% is going into people, process, culture and reskilling — and the strongest predictor of AI adoption isn't a growth mindset, it's whether people are exposed to leaders who actually use AI themselves.
Read briefing →Before You Measure Whether AI Makes Money, You Need to Know Whether It Makes the Right Decision
Before you measure whether AI makes money, you need to know whether it makes the right decision. Bunnings is already measuring Buddy that way — and the definition of a good AI decision becomes something the business needs to own.
Read briefing →AI Visibility Isn't Whether a Model Can Find You. It's Whether the Evidence Chooses You.
More than 17% of JB Hi-Fi's sales are already online, which makes product data a commercial problem. Blake England's advice: start with the customer decision, then work backwards to the data an AI needs to recommend you.
Read briefing →AI Shopping Isn't a Future Behaviour. Retailers Are Already Measuring It
Two measurements from the ARC AI Summit — Bunnings' AI assistant converting at roughly twice the rate, and Shopify's AI-agent traffic tripling with 58% higher conversion — show the retail goal moving from earning the click to earning the selection.
Read briefing →If You're Not in the Top 3 an AI Model Recommends, You're Invisible to the Customer
Brands outside the top three products an AI model recommends are effectively invisible at the moment of decision. The proof takes three questions and no software.
Read briefing →AI Isn't Just Becoming Another Channel. It's Becoming Part of the Selection Process
The ARC AI Summit showed that the retail AI question has moved beyond adoption: brands now need to know whether AI can see their products, why it selects them and who is accountable for the choice.
Read briefing →Just in: What Cloudflare's AI Crawler Block Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Cloudflare now blocks mixed-use AI crawlers by default, OpenAI has opened its Agents API to everyone, and Visa has quantified just how little consumers trust AI with their money.
Read briefing →Just in: What Salesforce's 'Agentic Enterprise' Push Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Salesforce named its AI agents, Visa quantified the trust gap, and Hugging Face remains the cautionary tale — together showing that agentic commerce has become a trust race.
Read briefing →44% of Retailers Advocate for Agentic Commerce. Only 24% Are Experimenting
Mastercard research finds a gap between agentic commerce enthusiasm and action among Australian merchants. As discoverability becomes infrastructure, the competitive question is shifting to why AI models select one brand over another.
Read briefing →Just in: What Meta's Muse Launch Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Meta's Muse launch, OpenAI's escaped test agents, Singapore's new safeguards and Australia's checkout data show that trust is now the real constraint on agentic commerce.
Read briefing →Just in: What Amazon's ChatGPT Ad Deal Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Amazon put its ad platform inside ChatGPT as publishers rebuilt for declining search traffic, investors backed agent identity and payments infrastructure, and Australia and Singapore advanced their agentic commerce rails.
Read briefing →Just in: What This Week's Grocery AI Agent Race Means for Brands Selling Through AI
Instacart and Shipt launched competing grocery AI agents as Mastercard, Visa and Ant International moved to build the identity layer for agent-led payments. Together, these developments show agentic commerce shifting from a product story to an infrastructure race.
Read briefing →What Australia's UCP Checkout Rollout Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Google chose Australia as its first Asia-Pacific market for Universal Commerce Protocol checkout, with Adore Beauty, Bunnings, Kogan Group, Petbarn and THE ICONIC already live. Read alongside agentic media buying, Singapore's governance-first rollout and McKinsey's build-vs-buy data, the week sketches where agentic commerce is actually heading — and what brands should do in the next two quarters.
Read briefing →AI made Royal Caribbean its favourite cruise line, then it bought the ticket from someone else
In this AdNews opinion piece, MARK founder Malin Gaertig unpacks how AI split brand visibility into two separate contests — being mentioned and being cited — and why Royal Caribbean wins the first while losing the second to aggregators at the exact moment a customer is ready to buy.
Read briefing →Just in: What Meta's Muse Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Meta's new payment-enabled AI agent, a fresh KPMG investment thesis, and a stalled Australian checkout moment all point the same direction this week: agentic commerce is now infrastructure, not experiment.
Read briefing →Just in: What Australia's AI Trust Gap Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Every week for months, the agentic commerce story has been about infrastructure — a new protocol here, a new payment rail there. This week the story flipped. New data out of Australia, alongside fresh moves from Amazon, Kohl's and one of the biggest landlords in America, made it clear that the technology is no longer the constraint. Consumer and customer trust is. If you sell anything through a channel an AI agent might soon touch, that shift changes what you should be building next, and it changes it now, not in some hypothetical future state.
Read briefing →Just in: What Anthropic's Retail Agent Blueprints Mean for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Every few weeks in agentic commerce, one announcement clarifies the whole map. This week it was Anthropic, releasing formal blueprints that let retailers build their own shopping and merchant agents on Claude, right as the industry heads into its most important quarter. Read alongside a fifteen per cent workforce cut at The Trade Desk, fresh McKinsey data on enterprises building instead of buying software, an ASEAN-wide push into agentic payments out of Singapore, and Australia's competition regulator putting agentic AI on its watch list, a pattern emerges that matters far more than any single headline: the value in agentic commerce is settling into infrastructure and trust, not into whoever owns the flashiest chat interface. For c-suite leaders trying to keep up with where to place bets, that distinction is the whole game.
Read briefing →Just in: What ChatGPT Ads' Billion-Dollar Run Rate Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
OpenAI just confirmed ChatGPT Ads has crossed a one billion US dollar annualised revenue run rate in under two hundred days, and it's opening the platform to advertisers across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in the same move. This is one of five developments from the past week worth a c-suite's attention if you're trying to keep pace with agentic commerce, and taken together they tell a consistent story: the infrastructure for agents is arriving in waves, while the trust and governance needed to use it properly is still catching up behind it.
Read briefing →Just in: What Google's Ad Tech Ruling Means for Brands Betting on Agentic Commerce
This week gave us more signal on agentic commerce than the previous month combined, and none of it came from a product launch. A US federal judge reshaped how Google's ad exchange will be allowed to operate. Brussels put ChatGPT in the same regulatory box as Google Search. And for the first time, someone published real numbers on which AI shopping agents actually cite which kinds of sources. Together, they're the clearest evidence yet that the infrastructure of agentic commerce — the pipes, the rules, the referee — is now being built as fast as the shopping experience itself.
Read briefing →Just in: What Australia's Trust Gap in Agentic Commerce Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Every week now brings a fresh batch of proof that agentic commerce is moving from slide-deck concept to live infrastructure. This week it was five stories at once: a landmark ad tech ruling, the biggest layoff in a category-leading DSP's history, an acquihire that reveals what platforms actually value in AI, a data point out of Australia that every retailer should sit with, and a payments infrastructure race that's outpacing the shopping experiences it's meant to serve. None of these stories are really separate. Read together, they say something specific about where the next twelve months are headed, and it's not the story most agentic commerce hype has been telling.
Read briefing →Just in: What Google Killing Assistant for Gemini Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Three separate stories broke this week, in three unrelated corners of the industry, and they are all describing the same shift from different angles. Google switched on Gemini as the default AI across billions of Android devices. A major payments study found that most merchants cannot see AI agents shopping on their sites even as they happen. And a US appeals court quietly decided who is legally responsible when an agent, not a person, clicks buy. Read together, they are the clearest signal yet that agentic commerce has stopped being a 2027 planning slide and started being a this-quarter operating problem.
Read briefing →Just in: What Google's Ad-Tech Ruling Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
A federal judge spared Google's ad-tech stack, Williams-Sonoma posted audited proof that an AI shopping assistant moves revenue, Wesfarmers went deeper on forecasting agents, and Singapore's regulator set limits on what agents can spend. The infrastructure under agentic commerce — courts, regulators, enterprise platforms — is finally catching up to the experiments running on top of it.
Read briefing →Just in: What the EU's ChatGPT Ruling Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Regulators, mall operators, measurement vendors and enterprise software giants are all independently racing to set the rules for how AI agents discover, compare and transact on our behalf. None of them are waiting for the rest of us to catch up, and none of them are coordinating with each other. If you are selling anything through an AI agent, in any market, that gap between fast-moving infrastructure and slow-moving standards is where your risk and your opportunity both live right now.
Read briefing →Just in: Why the Agentic Commerce Governance Gap Is the Real Risk for Brands Right Now
Agents are being handed more autonomy, more often, with real money attached, across media buying, retail discovery and payments, in three markets at once. The tooling to govern them already exists. Adoption of it doesn't.
Read briefing →Just in: What The Trade Desk's Agentic Pivot Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Five moves in one week — The Trade Desk's Kokai Zuma, Salesforce's Claudeforce, Australia's retail media slowdown, Singapore's agentic readiness gap and a payments alliance — tell you exactly where agentic commerce is heading next.
Read briefing →Just in: What Salesforce's Claudeforce Bet Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Salesforce renamed part of itself after another company's product for the first time ever. The Trade Desk moved its core interface to a conversational agent. A US newspaper group started building a version of its site no human will ever see. Read together, they're the same story: every layer of the stack that assumed a human was clicking is being rebuilt for an agent.
Read briefing →Just in: What Meta's $18 Billion Settlement Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Meta's $18bn child-safety settlement, The Trade Desk's agentic upgrade and Australia's first authorised AI-agent purchase all landed in one week — what the trust gap means for agentic commerce.
Read briefing →Just in: What The Trade Desk Going Agentic Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Four stories broke in the space of a week that, on their own, look like routine adtech and retail news. Read together, they say something sharper: the infrastructure of agentic commerce — the protocols, the interfaces, the guardrails — stopped being a slide in someone's 2027 roadmap and started shipping.
Read briefing →Just in: What Retail Media's US$200 Billion Ceiling Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Four things landed this week that, read together, tell you exactly where agentic commerce actually is right now — not where the hype decks say it is. Retail media, the channel that funded a decade of digital growth, just hit a ceiling. Google Cloud is telling enterprises the blocker isn't capability anymore, it's trust. Australia's banks quietly proved agentic AI can run regulated, high-stakes work at scale. And OpenAI and Meta are wiring agents into the ad-buying console itself, not just the shopping cart. None of these are the flashy protocol announcements that dominated agentic commerce headlines earlier this year. That's exactly why they matter more.
Read briefing →Just in: Why Agentic Commerce Just Stopped Being a Payments Race and Became a Liability, Shelf and Rails Question
Agentic commerce in 2026 has shifted from building AI agents to owning liability, the digital shelf and payment rails. What it means for brands.
Read briefing →Just in: What ChatGPT Selling Ads Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Something quiet happened yesterday that will shape how your brand gets found for the next decade. On 24 August, OpenAI switched on advertising inside ChatGPT across 31 European markets. On its own that reads like a monetisation story. Sat next to a courtroom decision on shopping bots, a wave of agent-standards announcements, and a measurement industry cutting jobs by the hundred, it reads like something bigger: the buying journey is migrating to a layer most brands still cannot see, let alone influence. Here is why this week matters, and what senior leaders can actually do about it.
Read briefing →Legacy commerce vs the agentic era
Every legacy commerce metric assumes a human is doing the clicking. Over the last couple of weeks, three separate events confirmed that assumption is breaking, one row of the framework at a time.
Read briefing →Just in: The Agentic Commerce Race Has Moved From Checkout to Control — What It Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
The agentic commerce fight is no longer about buying — it is about who owns the rails, the liability and the data. Here is what leaders should do.
Read briefing →Just in: What the Card Networks Joining One Rulebook Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents
Visa and Mastercard just joined a shared agentic-payments rulebook. Here is what it signals for brands selling through AI agents.
Read briefing →Just in: Why AI Agents Buying Media and Goods This Week Changes How Brands Sell
Agentic commerce became infrastructure this week — agent media buying, a landmark court ruling and APAC's payment rails, and what it means for brands.
Read briefing →‘Very rare and very curious’: Reddit, YouTube and TikTok citations collapse, but ChatGPT still recommends the same brands; Vale predictability and how about attribution?
A piece I contributed to Mi3: ChatGPT cut citations from Reddit, YouTube and TikTok, yet the brands it recommended barely changed. The real shift is toward company-owned, machine-readable surfaces.
Read briefing →Just in: The week agentic commerce stopped being a slide and became a fight over access, identity and money.
Agentic commerce just moved from strategy decks to courtrooms and card networks. Here is what it means for brands selling through AI agents.
Read briefing →The AI shopping opportunity that has nothing to do with ad spend.
A piece I wrote for Adnews: the real AI shopping opportunity isn't buying more impressions — it's making your brand machine-readable before the agent makes the choice for you.
Read briefing →At Stripe Tour Sydney, the message was clear: agentic commerce is already here, and the businesses winning are the ones that rebuilt their data and pricing infrastructure first.
Stripe Tour Sydney made the cost structure of doing business in an agentic economy explicit. First-party data infrastructure is now the common denominator across distribution, pricing agility and lean scaling.
Read briefing →Apple's flagship AI assistant, unveiled in June, runs on a model built by Google.
Apple pays Google to license Gemini as the intelligence behind the new Siri AI. Two companies that compete on almost everything else are now, at the model layer, running the same engine.
Read briefing →TikTok Shop's Southeast Asian sales grew tenfold in three years. Every major market in the region more than doubled year on year in 2025.
TikTok and Meta have both bet on agents that work for the seller, not the shopper. In Southeast Asia, where live-stream selling is the default discovery layer, the immediate opportunity is adopting the operational agent your platform is already handing you.
Read briefing →Just nine months after launching its browser Atlas, OpenAI discontinued working on it.
OpenAI is retiring Atlas as a standalone browser and folding its agent features into ChatGPT plus a Chrome extension. For brands, the browser layer is where agents watch, click and buy across any site — and it's where a new fraud and liability gap is opening.
Read briefing →Walmart put 200,000 products inside ChatGPT's checkout and watched conversion drop by two-thirds.
Walmart put 200,000 products inside ChatGPT's checkout and watched conversion drop by two-thirds. It didn't pull out. It rebuilt, keeping the AI app as a place to be found and routing the actual sale back to its own site, where the same shoppers now spend roughly a third more per order than everyone else. At this point the working thesis is that it can serve as a genuine distribution channel while you keep the transaction.
Read briefing →If you sell on Amazon, Shopee or Lazada, your AI visibility has already been configured for you.
This is the second in a series unpacking the different types of agents shaping how and whether brands get chosen. Closed marketplaces remove almost all brand control. Amazon, Shopee and Lazada have each made a different bet, and sellers influence none of it.
Read briefing →A federal court ruled this month that an AI agent doesn't need Amazon's, or any retailer's, permission to shop its site.
The Ninth Circuit cleared Perplexity's Comet agent to buy from Amazon without the retailer's sign-off. For brands, the split is now explicit: ChatGPT and Gemini still require opt-in feeds, but Perplexity has already made the decision for you.
Read briefing →On Shopify's Q2 earnings call they stated that 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 landed outside Shopify's top 100 categories.
AI agents are reshaping how niche products get found. Shopify's Q2 data shows 75% of AI-attributed purchases landed outside its top 100 categories — not because the mix shifted, but because structured product data lets agents match on precise intent instead of keyword popularity.
Read briefing →Deloitte Digital estimates AI agents could influence almost $1 trillion in annual consumer spending in Australia.
Poor machine readability is one of the biggest risks organisations are underestimating. I tested 11 retailers — 60% never got an AI agent to a real product page.
Read briefing →Accenture's 2026 Consumer Pulse Research, surveying 25,590 consumers across 16 countries, found 74% would delegate routine shopping tasks to an AI agent: negotiating deals, renewing subscriptions, reordering, resolving complaints.
74% of consumers would delegate routine shopping tasks to an AI agent, but only 9% would let one both choose and complete a purchase. Mastercard, Visa and Amex are racing to close the trust gap at the transaction layer — but getting recommended at all is still the problem most brands haven't started solving.
Read briefing →Deloitte reckons Asia Pacific will drive around two thirds of the growth in global retail sales over the next five years, backed by a shopper base of more than four billion people.
APAC will drive two thirds of global retail sales growth, with nearly 75% of consumers already using AI to shop — but only 29% of businesses have adopted agentic AI. Singapore is becoming the live testbed for authenticated agentic transactions and regulatory guardrails.
Read briefing →Shopee just did the opposite of what Amazon did. While Amazon blocked AI shopping agents, Shopee opened the door.
Shopee's OpenAI partnership puts it inside ChatGPT across Southeast Asia and Latin America. In Australia, agentic commerce infrastructure is arriving from Mastercard, Visa and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol — but most retailers are still watching from the sidelines.
Read briefing →McKinsey just published one of the clearest breakdowns yet of what's actually happening to advertising economics as AI takes over discovery and purchase decisions.
AI is reshaping advertising economics from discovery through transaction. McKinsey lays out four possible trajectories — and the common thread is that execution alone won't hold value anymore.
Read briefing →81% of shoppers have used AI in the last three months. 79% use it for research. 66% use it to compare products before buying a thing according to Inside Retail.
AI has become the default first step in most purchase journeys. The real commercial battle now happens at the research and comparison stage — the moment AI hands shoppers their shortlist.
Read briefing →AI models are about to decide a good chunk of Australia's shopping list this Black Friday through Boxing Day. All before a single ad gets clicked.
AI-assisted shopping is now mainstream in Australia, with up to 86% of shoppers using AI in their path to purchase. Retailers need to know what models say about them before the holiday season — because whoever the model recommends gets the click.
Read briefing →Two brands can look identical on AI visibility and be nowhere near each other when it actually matters
An AI-visibility audit across major cruise lines. Ungrounded, rival brands looked like the main threat. Grounded, every top entity was a booking aggregator — and two brands saw their Share of Model roughly halved.
Read briefing →Ungrounded vs. grounded: why a global QSR brand lost to a regional challenger in AI search
An AI-visibility audit across three QSR brands in the same category. Ungrounded, the global brand won on decades of training recall. Grounded, the regional chain dominated live search and the global brand was nearly invisible. Training recall and live discoverability are two separate competitions.
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