Three Kinds of AI Shopping Agents, and Why Shoppers Trust Some More Than Others
AI shopping agents are not one technology but three, and the type you encounter determines who controls it, what it can do, and how much of your data it touches. These include general discovery agents, retailer on-site assistants, and invisible B2B infrastructure platforms.
AI shopping agents are not one technology but three, and the type you encounter determines who controls it, what it can do, and how much of your data it touches. There are general discovery agents such as Google's AI Mode that research and compare products across many retailers; on-site assistants that retailers like Best Buy and Home Depot build into their own stores; and largely invisible business-to-business platforms that wire the whole system together. Consumer trust, meanwhile, is sharply uneven: a Deloitte survey cited by commercetools found only 8% of European shoppers are willing to let AI complete a checkout on their behalf. Understanding AI Shopping Agents: A Three-Part Framework The clearest way to make sense of the "AI shopping" landscape is to sort agents by their relationship to you and the retailer. Is this a tool you chose, a feature on a store's own website, or a backend service you never see? A price-monitoring firm, tgndata, offers a practical framing for…
