The Year AI Started Shopping For You: Agentic AI Changes Retail in 2025

This week in agentic AI news marks the end of a historic year where artificial intelligence agents finally became real tools that people use to shop and work. An AI agent is like a helpful robot that can think and make decisions for you. In 2025, these agents stopped being just ideas and started actually helping people buy things online. Retailers like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Google all launched their own shopping AI helpers this year. For example, Walmart created an AI assistant called Sparky, and Amazon has one called Rufus. These shopping agents can research products, compare prices, and even complete purchases for customers—all without the customer having to do the work themselves.

Record-Breaking Holiday Shopping Numbers Show Agentic AI Is Here to Stay

The numbers tell an amazing story about how fast agentic AI is growing. During the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2025, AI agents influenced about 17% of all shopping done online. That might not sound like much, but it equals $13.5 billion in sales. Think about this: one year ago, agentic AI was basically non-existent in shopping. Now, in just 12 months, it went from nothing to being responsible for almost one-fifth of holiday shopping. Industry experts say this is unusual—most technology takes many years to become this popular. By the end of the 2025 holiday season, major stores like Target had joined ChatGPT, and Google's AI shopping features were working with ChatGPT's instant checkout. The speed of this change surprised many people in the retail business.

Massive Money Flowing Into Agentic AI Companies

Investors are putting huge amounts of money into companies building agentic AI. In December 2025 alone, companies received mega-rounds of funding—which are really big investments—totaling $34.6 billion. The company Anthropic received $15 billion in Series G funding, which accounts for almost half of all the AI funding that month. Beyond just one company, eight other mega-rounds totaling $7.7 billion went to companies making physical AI—robots and manufacturing systems. This shows that investors believe agentic AI in the real world is the next big opportunity.

Asia-Pacific Wins the Global Agentic AI Race

While the United States is important, Asia-Pacific has become the world's largest market for agentic AI technology. In 2025, Asia-Pacific earned $3.0 billion in agentic AI revenue, beating North America which had $2.6 billion. This means companies in countries like China, India, and other Asian nations are leading the world in building and using AI agents. This is important because it shows that agentic AI is truly a global race, not just an American story.

How Digital Money Could Help AI Agents Pay For Things

As AI agents start buying things and making payments automatically, a new technology called stablecoins could become very important. Stablecoins are digital money that stays at the same value, unlike Bitcoin which goes up and down. When an AI agent buys something—like a self-driving car paying for electricity to charge—it needs to make tiny payments very fast. Regular payment systems are too slow for this. Stablecoins can handle automatic payments instantly and keep a clear record of what happened. According to research from McKinsey, agentic commerce could become a $1 trillion market in the United States by 2030, and $3 to $5 trillion globally. Companies like Google have shown support for using stablecoins with AI agents.

Businesses Using AI Agents to Help Salespeople and Customers

It's not just shopping—businesses are using AI agents to help sell things and serve customers. A company called Aviso launched new AI tools that use 50+ different AI agents to help sales teams. Instead of salespeople jumping between 14 different software programs, they use one smart system with many AI agents helping them. Aviso says their customers save up to 50% on costs by consolidating all their tools. Big companies like Lenovo, NetApp, and Walmart chose Aviso because it simplified their complicated systems. The AI agents handle forecasting, finding the right customers, and predicting who might leave as a customer.

Building Trust in AI Agents

As companies roll out these AI agents, they're learning that trust and safety are very important. When you give an AI agent the power to make decisions, you need to be sure it's doing the right thing. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise software will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. However, many businesses are being careful. They're testing AI agents on smaller, less important tasks first before letting them handle critical work. Companies are building safety features and ways to watch what the AI agents are doing to make sure they act correctly.