Joshua Lee.
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Joshua Lee, Chief Digital & Solutions Officer at Zenith Australia
We are entering a new era of commerce, where AI agents can handle the entire buying process for us with little or no manual input. Much like Samantha, the AI operating system in Spike Jonze’s prominent 2013 film “Her”, agentic commerce takes the form of a personal AI assistant that can source product information, provide recommendations, and complete purchases or arrangements on your behalf.
Now, twelve years later, we’re starting to see early examples of AI agents carrying out autonomous transactions for consumers with ease.
Agentic Commerce: 2025’s Breakout Moment
In October 2025, Walmart pioneered a collaboration with OpenAI enabling customers to make purchases directly in ChatGPT using its new ‘Instant Checkout’ feature. Just one month later, Target US also revealed its own partnership with OpenAI, introducing a new Target app within ChatGPT where customers can receive curated product ideas, browse through options, refine their cart and purchase with same-day delivery features.
What this shows is that ‘agentic commerce’ is not just an emerging concept – it’s gaining real momentum in elevating the conversational shopping experience. It’s only a matter of time until we start to see similar partnerships and integrations in Australia.
Why 2026 is the Tipping Point
By mid-2025, 60% of Australian adults aged 18+ used AI weekly, with ChatGPT leading at over 8 million monthly unique visitors, driven by Gen Z (Zenith Imagine Consumer Panel and SimilarWeb). By January 2026, weekly AI usage is expected to exceed 70% of all adults.
Today, AI search platforms are already shifting user behaviour by streamlining the discovery, research, and evaluation process pre-purchasing. According to PayPal, nearly half of Australians currently utilise AI for shopping purposes, and 61% indicate trust in AI-driven product recommendations.
Challenges: Control, Trust and Security in Focus
Although partnerships like ChatGPT’s (powered by OpenAI’s open-source Agentic Commerce Protocol) show significant progress, they are a closed experience. To access a wider audience and a new frictionless sales channel, brands would need to lose control over their discovery, UX layer and site traffic. While agentic commerce experiences can be integrated directly on a merchant’s site – via Shopify’s Model Contextual Protocol – this approach also requires greater developer effort to build and maintain.
Another concern with agentic commerce revolves around the protection of user privacy, personal and payment data. In response, payment technologies and cybersecurity companies are moving at pace to deploy solutions like tokenisation (substituting real credit card numbers with random tokens), alongside robust authentication and authorisation frameworks for AI agents that allow merchants and financial institutions to confirm their legitimacy and user control.
What Marketers and Agencies Must Do Now
To seize an agentic commerce advantage, marketers and agencies need to act swiftly and strategically. Success requires building brands that consumers want their agents to choose, by optimising product metadata for AI, continuously auditing brand visibility, and creating campaigns that win at both the data and demand generation level.
Marketers should also invest in AI readiness, ensuring their offers, content, and claims are easily discoverable and verifiable by AI agents. Those who start now – bridging cultural creativity with systematic technical preparation – will claim first-mover advantage, forging new relationships with both human and AI decision-makers.
This pivotal moment calls for curiosity, bold investment and a sense of urgency. The brands that prepare now won’t just adapt to agentic commerce; they’ll redefine for benchmark for the rest of the industry.
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