Agentic AI Reshapes How Shoppers Find Brands

Executives from American Express, Google and Walmart discussed how AI agents are changing the way consumers and merchants interact.

Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Shopping — General

Agentic AI Reshapes How Shoppers Find Brands

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At the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, representatives from American Express, Google and Walmart described how agentic commerce is changing brand-customer interaction. Merchants are working out how to make their products discoverable to AI shopping agents.

Why it matters

Agentic commerce upends the current model that drives shoppers back to merchant websites, shifting who controls what brands are presented to consumers. Brands that cannot be found by AI agents risk losing visibility in this emerging channel.

Merchants connect their product catalogues to AI agents through model context protocols, an open standard for linking agents to external data sources. Roughly three-quarters of consumers still want to buy from their preferred merchant even when an AI agent does the shopping, according to figures cited at the conference.

The players

American Express

American Express is a global payments and financial services company that operates one of the largest card networks in the world.

Google

Google is a technology company whose search and AI products are increasingly used to power consumer shopping discovery.

Walmart

Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States and is using AI agents as a tool to facilitate its customer relationships.

The details

Agentic AI works as an intermediary between customer and merchant, with AI agents determining which brands are presented back to the customer for consideration. Consumers use conversational AI to refine what they are looking for, and Walmart describes payment as the most personal part of the shopping journey.

November 2, 2026: Money20/20 panel discussions on agentic commerce are reported.

Culture Shift

Agentic shopping built on Model Context Protocol connections moves product discovery from search results and merchant websites into AI assistants. Brands that once relied on direct traffic to their own sites must now make catalogues legible to agents that choose what consumers see.

Shoppers may increasingly ask AI assistants to find and buy products, and the brands surfaced by those assistants will shape what they see. Consumers who prefer a specific merchant can still expect to be asked whether they want that retailer, since most want to keep shopping with their preferred brands.

The takeaway

Shoppers who want a particular brand should check whether their favorite retailers have made their catalogues available to AI shopping tools. Keeping preferred merchants in view matters because most consumers still want to buy from them even when an agent handles the purchase.