Chris Jones, MD, PSE Consulting:
“Amazon’s expansion of Shop Direct is another clear signal that commerce is moving rapidly towards agent-led experiences. What’s particularly notable is that AI-driven journeys aren’t being built by new players such as Anthropic and OpenAI, but also by retailers like Amazon.
Many merchants have approached initiatives like UCP as a gateway to innovation, particularly in opening up access to AI ecosystems led by players such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The focus has largely been on enhancing customer experience, increasing conversion and staying competitive in an AI-first landscape.
However, there’s the potential for a strategic blind spot to emerge. These new rails don’t just enable collaboration with emerging standalone AI partners – they also create an opportunity for competitors to own the purchasing journey. Amazon’s move highlights how easily competitive third parties can sit between the merchant and the customer, including at the point of transaction.
As merchants open their storefronts to agentic commerce they are going to need to set rules about which ones they want to let through and where they want to block certain players. In addition, merchants need to be careful in assuming that all users who sit behind Claude or ChatGPT are human, and are genuine shoppers, rather than bad actors. Agentic fraud monitoring and controls need to be extensively adapted for both risk and strategic reasons.”
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