## Agentic AI Is Changing Shopping Forever

This week showed us something exciting: AI agents — computers that can think and make choices — are becoming the new way people find and buy things. These aren't just regular search tools. They're intelligent helpers that understand what you want and can actually complete a task without you having to click a hundred times.

## Shopify's Game-Changing Numbers

Shopify announced something huge this week: when AI agents help people shop, those people buy 11 times more stuff. Think about that. It's like taking a regular customer and making them buy 11 times as much. Shopify's president said the company has seen AI-driven shopping traffic grow 7 times since January 2025. Shop Pay, which handles the payment side of things, processed a massive $29 billion in sales in the last three months. Even inside Shopify's own company, over 750,000 store owners used an AI assistant to help them with their business, having almost 100 million conversations.

## Google Reimagines Business Discovery

Google explained how its AI agents find businesses and products for you. Here's how it works: when you ask AI Mode a question, the AI fans out your question into dozens of related searches. It's like having a smart person break down your question into many smaller questions. Then the AI looks through a database of 250 million places and a huge database of 50 billion products. The AI carefully reads reviews and recommendations to give you an answer it can actually prove with facts. For marketing people, this means you need high-quality reviews, good product information, and mentions from trusted websites.

## New Partnerships Shape the AI Future

Snap and Perplexity announced a huge partnership this week — $400 million in value. This means Snapchat users will soon be able to use Perplexity's AI search right inside the app. Perplexity will control what the AI says, and it won't use your information for ads.

Apple made a major announcement about Siri, the voice assistant that comes with iPhones and iPads. Apple will pay Google about $1 billion per year to use a specially designed version of Google's Gemini AI. This upgrade comes in the spring, and it means Siri will become much smarter at understanding what you really need.

## AI Becomes Part of Real-World Shopping

Cisco created special AI computers for stores and factories. These machines run AI right where customers are, instead of sending information far away to big data centers. This means stores can instantly know if items are in stock, which customers are waiting in line, and what products they might want to buy — all in real time.

## AI-Generated Marketing Goes Mainstream

Google created its first fully AI-made advertisement, showing a toy turkey using AI search to escape Thanksgiving. The company didn't make a big deal about it being AI-made, saying people care more about the story than the tool. Coca-Cola went further and created AI ads for the holidays, but people complained because some of the AI-made animals looked a bit weird and didn't move smoothly. Coca-Cola said using AI cut production time from a full year down to just one month.

## Marketing Departments Go All-In on AI

Marketing departments are leading the way in using AI everywhere. 42% of marketing and sales teams now regularly use AI, and that number goes up to 55% in tech companies. Across all companies worldwide, 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one part of their business. This is a huge jump from just 78% one year ago.