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Robot hand touching on screen then shopping cart symbols appears. 3D Rendering getty Amazon, Google, Walmart, OpenAI, and Shopify are racing to build AI assistants that can shop for you — while blocking rivals from touching their data. The winner will own the customer relationship; the loser will be reduced to a warehouse. For decades, the e-commerce playbook was simple: own the traffic, own the customer. Search engines, marketplaces, and retailers fought to be the first click in a shopper’s journey and the last click before checkout. Now, a new battleground has emerged — agentic shopping — and the stakes are exponentially higher. AI agents aren’t just recommending products; they’re making the purchase for you, across sites, without you ever opening a browser or tapping an app. The platform that controls your shopping agent controls your entire commerce relationship — discovery, decision, payment, and loyalty. Every major player wants to win that prize. And no one wants to be reduced to a nameless fulfillment partner in someone else’s ecosystem. The Tension: Agentic Potential vs. Disintermediation Risk Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Apple, Walmart, and Shopify all see the promise: an AI agent that knows your preferences, compares every option, and gets you the right product instantly. But here’s the catch — to deliver on that vision, an agent needs access to every retailer’s product, price, and inventory data. And once you give another platform that access, you risk losing the customer relationship entirely. That’s why the first phase of the AI commerce wars has been defined less by mass adoption — and more by defensive moves to block competitors from building better agents. Flashpoint: Amazon vs. Google’s Shopping AI The most visible skirmish came when Amazon not only blocked Google’s Mariner shopping bot from crawling its site but also pulled…

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Filed under: News - @ August 9, 2025 3:23 am