More than 10,000 retail and commerce leaders gathered in Las Vegas last week for Shoptalk 2026. Across sessions with Coach, OpenAI, Wayfair, Meta, Sephora, and others, the conversation around agentic commerce centered less on future potential and more on what’s already live: conversational assistants shaping product discovery, in-ad buying flows tightening the path to conversion, on-site agents driving brand engagement, and third-party shopping surfaces creating new ways for brands to reach and convert customers off-site.

For all the momentum, many leaders we spoke with are still working out their agentic strategy. In conversations throughout the week, retailers described a persistent gap between what they see happening now and what they can confidently plan for next. We heard broad consensus that search and discovery have already shifted, but much less certainty about how the market will develop from here. Three themes stood out.

1. Agentic commerce is gaining traction, but retailers need a standard framework

Because agentic commerce is still early, brands are assessing where to start, who to partner with, how to structure their product data, and how that data should be syndicated across AI surfaces without an established playbook.

At the same time, the market is evolving at an unprecedented pace. In the three months since NRF, loyalty data has moved from a theoretical advantage to a live product. Sephora’s global chief digital officer described how the brand is now using loyalty data in its ChatGPT app to personalize recommendations and surface benefits like samples and free shipping.

Discovery is where the urgency feels most acute. In the Women in AI session with PwC, Klarna, Novi, and Stripe, Novi’s CEO argued that AI agents are a new storefront: if your brand is not discoverable there, it risks becoming invisible. In a keynote, OpenAI’s product partnerships lead for search and commerce said that more than half of searches on the platform are discovery-based, and 70% of those include constraints. That means shoppers aren’t just typing in keywords; they’re entering context-rich prompts around scenarios like planning a trip to Greece, organizing a Super Bowl party, or comparing appliances. 

For businesses, that raises the question of what a product needs to look like to be found by agents. In Tapestry’s session with Stripe, the company’s SVP of global digital product and omnichannel innovation emphasized the importance of direct product feeds, which give agents more structured, up-to-date product data than web crawling alone. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite is helping leading retailers syndicate their product catalogs across supported agents—without requiring separate integrations. 

Many retailers we talked to are taking a similar test-and-learn approach, running experiments to track how their products are being found, recommended, and purchased across AI surfaces.

2. Agents are extending beyond the chat window 

Agentic commerce and its primitives are showing up across a widening set of surfaces, each with its own level of maturity and its own path from discovery to conversion. This shift is expanding into native checkout, customer service, and the behind-the-scenes systems that shape whether a customer can find, buy, and receive the right product smoothly.

Meta offered one example with a new Facebook checkout flow—built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)—that takes shoppers from an ad click to product details, AI-generated review summaries, and the option to purchase without leaving the app. Though not every embedded checkout flow is agentic, it reflects a broader shift toward more embedded commerce.

In a session on the future of retail, Shoptalk’s head of content and insights predicted a new wave of consumer brands will be built natively on agentic infrastructure, helped by lower customer acquisition costs and less reliance on their own websites as the main entry point. AI startups exhibiting at Shoptalk covered every layer of the commerce stack, from catalog enrichment and discovery to post-purchase. 

Agentic commerce will not be defined by one LLM or channel. As more category-specific apps are being built across fashion, beauty, home decor, and beyond, retailers are choosing whether to invest limited time and resources into first-party or third-party agentic experiences.

3. In an AI world, brand matters more than ever

When AI makes discovery and product comparison easier, trust and brand affinity need to do more of the work in convincing shoppers to choose your brand.

That theme ran through Shoptalk sessions. New Balance’s president and CEO talked about building customer preference through consistency, rather than constant sales. The company invested over $25 million in store updates in 2025, and is training store associates to explain technical products in more detail to reinforce credibility among customers. Tapestry pointed to Coach’s ongoing research on Gen Z as part of the brand’s continued relevance over time. Victoria’s Secret’s CEO suggested that customers are increasingly drawn to store experiences that feel comforting and confidence-building, a dynamic she referred to as the “soothing economy.” And Stitch Fix’s CEO described Stitch Fix Vision—a new AI-powered visualization tool for personalized outfit discovery built on the company’s deep first-party client data.

As agentic commerce accelerates, the infrastructure behind the brand experience will have to work across more surfaces. Retailers will need unified customer data and systems that can carry identity and context across channels.

How Stripe can help

In agent-driven journeys, customers often arrive at checkout ready to buy and less willing to tolerate friction. That makes payment performance key. Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite dynamically surfaces payment methods most likely to convert based on more than 100 signals. Businesses see a 2%–3% increase in conversion on average after adopting Stripe’s optimized payment surfaces, demonstrating how better payment method presentation, fraud decisions, and checkout flow can drive revenue.

New agentic flows still depend on the same fundamentals that drive retail performance today: fast, branded checkout; the right payment methods; strong fraud controls; and unified commerce data. By connecting those systems across online, in-store, and in-app channels, Stripe makes it easier to deliver more personalized, consistent experiences wherever customers interact with your brand.

With the Agentic Commerce Suite, businesses can connect their catalog and commerce infrastructure once, then extend into compatible agents and surfaces as they emerge. 

To learn more about the Agentic Commerce Suite, sign up for the waitlist and read our integration guides.