This year marked the birth of agentic commerce

E-commerce in 2025 was defined by retailers building the infrastructure for AI-powered shopping experiences with flashy product launches.

The red carpet rollout of agentic commerce and AI shopping assistants started bright and early in 2025. Sophisticated AI chatbots, trained to reason and act on behalf of shoppers, went from being a mere NRF buzzword to being part of the new AI tools retailers launched over the past 12 months.

From Shopify and Walmart to Google and Target, companies created the core tool kit for shopping via AI agents. And from Google’s checkout powered by agentic AI to Target and Walmart’s ChatGPT integrations, retailers raced to embed AI assistants directly into the shopping journey.

As more people started using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to find and research items, traffic from AI sources to retailer websites surged. By the 2025 holiday season, major retailers including Target had gone live on ChatGPT, Google had jumped in, and digital shopping assistants—including Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky—had evolved rapidly with new features.

Experts agreed 2025 was the year agentic AI laid its foundation in online shopping.

When asked how he’ll remember 2025, Scot Wingo, CEO of AI startup Refibuy, told Retail Brew it was the year of “the arrival” of agentic commerce.

“It’s kind of like autonomous vehicles,” Wingo said. “Ultimately we’ll get to fully autonomous, but we have to walk up to it and get comfortable with it. This year, we did a lot of researching and finding products with Gen AI, which I still put in the agentic commerce bucket. Next year, I think it’ll be doing a lot of purchases, either at our request or on our behalf.”

According to independent e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, in 2025, retail handled both success and setbacks. “I will remember it negatively because of tariffs and all the chaos that came from that,” Kaziukėnas told Retail Brew. “And then I remember it positively as perhaps the birth of agentic commerce.”

“A lot of the pieces and ideas and the structure for it have been, by now, figured out, and now it’s just a matter of seeing if it actually gathers user adoption,” Kaziukėnas said.

However, Kaziukėnas cautioned that there’s been plenty of hype—partnerships, announcements, prototypes—but most of it is just the excitement of entering a new industry.

“I still think that ultimately the things Amazon is doing and the core integrations ChatGPT is doing are the things that actually meaningfully impact the market,” he said.

Zoom out: The infrastructure buildout moved quickly in 2025 with key milestones arriving in waves.

April kicked off the year with major payment players—PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard—all dropping announcements simultaneously, Wingo noted. Then ChatGPT’s instant checkout feature arrived in late September, further accelerating the shift.

But the payment infrastructure was just one piece. The real action was in how retailers positioned themselves in the gold rush for AI agents.

“It’s been interesting to see how serious Google has taken this and really come from way behind to really surging to parity or ahead with Gemini 3,” Wingo remarked. “It’s been interesting to see Amazon’s position of not allowing, not participating in, and having their very different ‘little island’ kind of strategy over there. It was also interesting to see Walmart take the opposite approach of really being very aggressive with it.”

Ultimately, Wingo came back to Salesforce data that showed AI and agents influenced 17% of holiday orders, or $13.5 billion in holiday sales, over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

“We went from nothing to 17% in a year,” Wingo said. “That’s very unusual in my world of e-commerce.”