What will ads in an agent assisted shopping world look like?

As people get comfortable using AI-powered shopping assistants to buy things on their behalf, ​​the industry’s next order of business is figuring out how advertising fits into this new shopping experience.

Recently, OpenAI said that soon it will begin testing ads within ChatGPT. Initially, ads will appear below ChatGPT’s answers when a relevant sponsored product or service matches the conversation, and will be clearly labeled to stand out from a regular response. OpenAI is borrowing from Amazon’s playbook which also started out by selling pay-per-click sponsored ads back in 2012.

Meanwhile, Amazon recently released a new interface that lets AI agents communicate with Amazon’s ad systems. Amazon’s new Model Context Protocol server lets AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT translate plain-English requests directly into Amazon’s ad console, making things like managing campaigns and handling accounts agent-led.

These moves will push regular digital advertising on retail sites out of the spotlight, which means ads of the future will sit within retailers’ tech stacks or ad consoles and become part of the agentic conversation or agentic browsing experience, experts told Retail Brew. AI will show items based on clean product data, accurate pricing, real-time inventory, customer ratings, and brand trust signals. So, the best ad may just be a five-star review and a SKU that actually exists.

“The reality of it is a lot of the ads in the future with agentic shopping or agentic commerce will really be behind the scenes,” Andy Szanger, director of strategy at CWD, a company that manages tech stacks for retailers, told Retail Brew. “In many cases, the advertising, when it comes to doing it through an agentic commerce solution, will not be as obvious.”

“When you say, ‘What does an ad look like?’ Well, it really doesn’t. It actually goes behind the scenes,” Szanger added, after demoing how to buy a carry-on suitcase on Perplexity’s AI browser, Comet, in real time.

Future of ads: The definition of an agentic ad, Szanger said, depends on who’s seeing it—your AI agent or you directly. In true blue agent-to-agent commerce, consumers may never see the ad, Szanger pointed out. Instead, a brand could offer ChatGPT a time-sensitive discount (say, $20 off a suitcase in the next hour) during the search process, letting AI agents negotiate deals on behalf of people based on their queries and preferences, he added.

In the eyes of Andrew Lipsman, independent retail media analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, ad dollars tend to grow over time. “Retail media, especially in its early days, just got a disproportionate share of the incremental dollars coming into digital advertising,” Lipsman said. “Think of agentic advertising more in those terms, that it’ll eat into the growth of everyone else.”

Traditionally, ads have been about urging consumers to make an emotional decision. Looking to the future, Szanger said, we could see a scenario of more interactive ads where people can go in and ask a question within the ad itself. “On the backend, all it is, is a microsite that’s tying that ad back to my website, as if I was talking to a chatbot directly on my website,” he said.

Changing form: Talking about ads on OpenAI, Lipsman said the sponsored ads will need to evolve into performance ads where advertisers pay based on measurable actions, adding that OpenAI needs to build a performance channel similar to Google or Meta to reach enough scale.

“When you have just a lot of traffic, which they do, you can have a display ad business, which seems like what they’re doing with the first iteration,” he said. “It’s not going to be a big enough business to scale. So they need to ultimately build a performance channel.”

Meanwhile, the success of Google’s Search Ads and Performance Max ads or Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns with e-commerce advertisers has shown the model works.

“Performance media is what drives ad dollars,” Lipsman said. “If you think about the biggest pools of ad spend in digital, it’s been Google, the first performance machine, Meta, the second big performance advertising machine, and then Amazon and retail media. You have to have that mechanism that allows you to close the loop, that makes it easier to invest.”

As brands adapt from SEO to agentic-era discovery like AEO or GEO, ad dollars will begin migrating toward more productive channels, even as familiar ad formats remain firmly in place for now.

Ultimately, Szanger said, new technology adoption takes time. “I don’t think we’re going to see the ads as you think about them today go away this year,” he said.