For those of us keeping track, this may be the quietest industry disruption in history. The launch of ChatGPT Instant Checkout today marks a major milestone in the agentic commerce arms race.
My message to brands and retailers is simple: if you’re not taking this seriously yet, read carefully.
Since Argentina was crowned World Cup champions in Qatar, the pace of AI-driven commerce has been staggering:
It took thirteen years for mobile browsing to reach parity with desktop in e-commerce. By contrast, in just three years since AI search entered the mainstream, we are already witnessing a dramatic shift in consumer behavior.
Surveys suggest that roughly one-third of US adults now use personal AI agents regularly for product discovery and brand interaction (eMarketer). About one-quarter feel comfortable allowing it to make purchases on their behalf (Bain & Company). Another study found that one in three respondents would permit AI to handle purchases directly, showing growing openness to delegation (TechRadar).
Search behavior underscores the same trend. Bain & Company reports that eighty percent of consumers now rely on AI-written summaries for at least forty percent of their queries, and nearly sixty percent of searches end without a click to a website (Bain & Company). In other words, consumers are already beginning to delegate significant parts of the discovery and decision-making process to AI.
Moore’s Law, articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, predicted that the computing power of microchips would double every ~24 months.
AI, by contrast, has blown past this cadence. Since 2010, the computation used to train leading AI models has doubled roughly every 6 months. (Our World in Data)
Look three years ahead, and AI computing is projected to be 64 times more powerful than it is today. The implications for agentic commerce, from reasoning capabilities to personalization to logistics automation, are extraordinary.
The takeaway is clear: agentic commerce is here.
It’s no longer about optimizing for clicks or impressions. It’s about becoming agent-ready: structured data, clean APIs, reliable fulfillment, and trust signals that AI systems can understand and prioritize.
It’s an exciting time to be building in retail technology. At fabric, our team is designing the Agentic Commerce Platform to give brands and retailers the tools they need to thrive in this new era. A key part of that is fabric’s Product Agent, built to enrich and automate product data to improve discoverability in AI search. The potential for growth is seemingly limitless. And the next three years will matter more than the last thirty.
Let’s go. 🚀
Director, Product Marketing @ fabric