Shoptalk 2026 Insights: How Agents Are Transforming Retail

At Shoptalk 2026, which brought together more than 10,000 retail and commerce leaders, agentic commerce was treated not as a distant future but as a shift already underway. Conversational assistants are changing product discovery, purchases are increasingly happening directly within ads, and agents both on and off-site are redefining conversion and brand engagement.

Still, many retailers have yet to establish a clear strategy. The consensus was that while search and discovery methods have already changed, how the market will unfold going forward remains uncertain.

Three key points stood out.

• Absence of a standard framework: Agentic commerce is still in its early stages, so brands need to first figure out where to start, who to partner with, and how to structure and distribute product data across AI surfaces.
• Shift in the center of discovery: According to OpenAI's presentation, more than half of platform searches are discovery-type, and 70% of those involve conditional requests, such as planning a trip or preparing for a Super Bowl party. As contextual prompts—not simple keywords—become the norm, products need to be structured in a form agents can find.
• Importance of direct feeds: Tapestry emphasized the importance of direct product feeds that are more structured and up-to-date than web crawling. Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite is helping brands distribute their catalogs to supported agents without separate integrations.

Agents aren't confined to chat windows alone. Meta showcased a Facebook checkout flow built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) that connects ad clicks to product information, AI-generated review summaries, and in-app purchases. While not a fully identical experience, it signals that commerce is increasingly moving toward an embedded model.

The event also saw a wave of AI startups covering catalog enrichment, discovery, and post-purchase experience. As retail's entry points are no longer tied to a single website, new brands are increasingly likely to be built from the ground up on agentic infrastructure.

The easier AI makes exploration and comparison, the bigger a role brand and trust play. New Balance has invested more than $25 million in 2025 in store renovations and trained store staff to better explain technical products, building trust. Coach is differentiating through Gen Z research, Victoria's Secret through a more comfortable, confidence-building store experience, and Stitch Fix through AI-powered visualization tools like Stitch Fix Vision.

Ultimately, the faster agentic commerce accelerates, what's needed isn't more channels but a better-connected foundation. Retailers need integrated infrastructure that can link the same customer data, identity, and context across online, offline, and in-app.

Stripe positions itself as playing a role in boosting checkout conversion within this trend. Its Optimized Checkout Suite dynamically surfaces the payment methods most likely to convert based on more than 100 signals, and the company states that adoption has led to an average conversion rate improvement of 2%~3%. In an era where agents bring customers right up to checkout, fast, on-brand checkout, strong fraud prevention, and consistent commerce data become the final battleground.