How does agentic commerce shift power between brands, retailers, marketplaces and AI platforms?

By James Thomson, Managing Partner of Equity Value Advisors · Published October 12, 2026 · Last updated October 12, 2026

Short answer

Agentic commerce moves power toward whoever controls the agent the shopper trusts and the data that agent reads. AI platforms gain influence over discovery. Marketplaces and retailers fight to keep the transaction and the customer. Payment networks become gatekeepers of agent identity. Brands lose control of how they are presented unless they supply authoritative product truth, but brands with real, machine-readable differentiation can gain.

Key points

Discovery is consolidating around a few AI assistants. The transaction is still contested.
Events in 2026 show each player defending its position: Amazon sued to block an outside agent, OpenAI pulled back from native checkout, and Google built a protocol with major retailers.
Brands hold one asset every agent needs: accurate product information. That asset is the source of their bargaining power.
The pattern resembles the rise of Amazon, compressed into fewer years.

Who controls what in agentic commerce?

Player	What it controls	Where it gains	Where it is exposed
AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity)	The conversation, shopper intent and the recommendation set	Discovery, comparison and future advertising or referral revenue	Depends on merchants and retailers for catalog data, fulfillment and trust
Marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart)	Catalog, reviews, fulfillment, payment and the customer account	In-store agents that keep shoppers inside the marketplace	Outside agents that compare across stores and route demand elsewhere
Retailers (Target, Best Buy, Home Depot)	Assortment, pricing, loyalty programs and fulfillment	Integrations that bring AI-sourced shoppers to their checkout	Disintermediation if the AI platform owns the shopper relationship
Payment networks (Visa, Mastercard)	Credentials, tokens and authorization	Verifying which agents may pay and on whose behalf	Limited, because every model still needs payment
Brands	Product truth, product design and distribution policy	Recommendations earned on real attributes rather than paid shelf placement	Presentation, customer data and margin if intermediaries take control

What does 2026 show about the balance of power?

Four developments show how the players are positioning:

Amazon defended its storefront and then lost the first round in court. Amazon won a preliminary injunction in March 2026 blocking Perplexity’s Comet shopping agent. In August 2026 the Ninth Circuit overturned it, reasoning that an agent acting on a user’s instruction is the user for purposes of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The underlying case continues.
Amazon built its own agent. On May 13, 2026, Amazon replaced Rufus with Alexa for Shopping, which compares products, tracks price history, schedules purchases and, through Buy for Me, completes purchases on other retailers’ sites. Amazon says Rufus helped more than 300 million customers in 2025.
OpenAI stepped back from the transaction. In March 2026 OpenAI said its first Instant Checkout did not offer the flexibility it wanted. It now lets merchants use their own checkout and focuses on product discovery. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair supply product data through its Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Walmart launched an app inside ChatGPT with account linking and loyalty.
Google aligned with retailers. Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol in January 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. In October 2026 it began a phased US rollout that lets merchants add checkout to listings in AI Mode and Gemini, with options to send the cart to the merchant’s site, pay on Google or link accounts.

Read together, these events suggest AI platforms are winning influence over discovery faster than they are winning the transaction. Retailers and marketplaces are holding on to checkout, payment and the customer account, at least for now.

Where do brands lose power?

Presentation. Agents assemble a brand’s story from feeds, listings, reviews and reseller pages. Creative assets and packaging carry less weight when a shopper reads a three-line summary. See who controls the brand when an AI agent describes products.
Routing. An agent may recommend the right product and buy it from an unauthorized seller or the cheapest channel.
Customer access. The party that owns the conversation and the checkout holds the data a brand needs for repeat purchase.
Economics. Intermediaries tend to monetize the demand they control, through referral fees, sponsored recommendations or preferred access. See how AI shopping agents will make money.

Where can brands gain power?

Differentiation that agents can read. Agents surface attributes shoppers would struggle to research. A brand with a real performance, ingredient or durability advantage can win recommendations it could not buy with shelf placement. See how to make product differentiation machine-readable.
Authoritative data. Every agent needs accurate specs, availability and policies. The brand is the natural source. Brands that publish clean, consistent data become the reference other sources defer to.
Choice of partners. Several platforms compete for merchant participation. That competition gives brands room to negotiate data access and terms, as long as they avoid exclusive dependence on one platform.

Why does the Amazon precedent matter?

Amazon began as a sales channel and became the reference point for price, reviews, advertising and discovery in many categories. Brands that treated it as one more account found later that it shaped their pricing, inventory and enterprise value. AI platforms could follow the same path in less time because they sit one step earlier in the buying process, at the moment of intent. Brands that set policies early on data, distribution and customer access will negotiate from a stronger position. See whether agentic commerce could create another platform concentration risk.

What should brand executives do about the power shift?

The objective is controlled participation: make the brand easy for legitimate agents to use while protecting visibility, customer relationships and economics. In practice that means owning product truth, policing distribution, deciding which customer relationship elements to keep in each channel, measuring contribution rather than attributed revenue, and avoiding integrations that cannot be changed if terms worsen.

What good looks like

The brand participates across several AI platforms and marketplaces, supplies the same authoritative data to all of them, knows which sellers capture agent-routed demand and can show the economics of each channel. No single intermediary controls a share of discovery that management cannot explain or replace.

Frequently asked follow-up questions

Will AI platforms replace marketplaces like Amazon?

Not in the near term. As of October 2026, AI platforms mostly influence discovery and hand the transaction to merchants or retailers, while Amazon is building its own agent to keep shoppers in its store. The more likely outcome is a layer of AI discovery on top of existing marketplaces and retailers.

Can a brand block AI agents from buying its products?

Only partially. The Ninth Circuit’s August 2026 ruling in Amazon v. Perplexity weakens computer-access law as a tool for blocking agents that act on a user’s instructions. Brands have more influence through distribution policy, data feeds and commercial terms than through blocking.

Does agentic commerce favor large brands or challengers?

Agentic commerce favors brands with clear, verifiable differentiation and clean data, whatever their size. Large brands that relied on shelf placement and advertising scale may lose some advantage. Challengers with strong product attributes but weak distribution may gain.

Sources

The Next Web, Court lets Perplexity’s AI agent shop on Amazon, overturning a ban, August 5, 2026.
CNBC, Amazon wins court order to block Perplexity’s AI shopping agent, March 10, 2026.
Amazon, Alexa for Shopping announcement, May 13, 2026.
Digital Commerce 360, OpenAI reveals updates to its agentic commerce experience for ChatGPT, March 24, 2026.
InfoQ, Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, January 2026.
Shopifreaks, Google Merchant Center UCP hub, October 9, 2026.

What changed in agentic commerce, and what it means for brands.

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