This week I've been thinking about middlemen.
Not the old kind — the distributors, the resellers, the channel partners. The new kind. The ones that showed up this week all at once, without asking.
Google AI Mode crossed 75 million daily active users and started testing shopping ads inside the conversational interface. Meta embedded Manus — its $2B AI acquisition — into Ads Manager for 4 million+ advertisers. OpenAI rolled ChatGPT ads to every free and Go user. And maybe the biggest move of all: OpenAI and Amazon announced a $50B strategic partnership that Forrester says may have just won consumer agentic commerce.
Three platforms. Same week. Same move: inserting an AI layer between your product and your buyer.
This week: why the real story isn't ads — it's the full-stack connection from ERP to AI checkout. Plus: a chart on the agentic commerce explosion, and this week's news roundup.
—Chris
For 20 years, the buyer's journey had a clean separation: marketing owned awareness, sales owned the deal, and the ERP handled fulfillment on the backend. These systems talked to each other through humans — handoffs, meetings, spreadsheets, Slack threads.
That separation is collapsing. And the companies that understand why are about to have an enormous advantage.
Here's what's being built — from both ends simultaneously:
From the top down: Shopify and Google co-developed UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) — an open standard that lets AI agents browse catalogs, build carts, and complete checkout. Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and Etsy are already on board. Google is rolling agentic checkout into AI Mode in Search and Gemini. OpenAI's ChatGPT already has "Buy it in ChatGPT" live with Etsy and Shopify merchants.
From the bottom up: SAP announced MCP servers for Commerce Cloud — so AI agents can query inventory, pricing, and product data natively from SAP's backend. Oracle has 1,000+ AI agents across Fusion apps connecting supply chain, procurement, and finance. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Commerce MCP Server exposes catalog, pricing, promotions, inventory, carts, orders, and fulfillment as MCP-enabled capabilities.
And now the bridge: The OpenAI + Amazon deal is the missing piece. Amazon's $50B investment includes a co-created Stateful Runtime Environment on Bedrock — persistent-memory agents that move across software systems, hold context, and execute multi-step workflows. Pair that with Amazon's marketplace (the #1 product search engine) and ChatGPT (the #3 product search tool per Forrester), and you have the first end-to-end agentic commerce pipeline at scale.
What this means for PMMs: When an AI agent can discover your product, compare it to competitors, check real-time inventory via MCP, negotiate pricing against ERP data, and complete checkout via UCP — all in one session — your "funnel" isn't a funnel anymore. It's a single transaction.
The PMMs who win will be the ones who understand this full stack. Not just the discovery layer (that was Issue #5). Not just the ad layer. The whole thing — from how your product appears in an LLM's training data to how your ERP confirms the order.
On February 27, Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI — the largest AI deal in history. But the commerce implications have been underreported.
Forrester's thesis: the most popular answer engine (ChatGPT) + the most popular product search engine (Amazon) may dominate the most popular search engine (Google). Amazon leverages OpenAI to power Rufus as a massive product discovery engine. New product feeds for Shop Direct create a direct line to Amazon's chat shopping experience.
Read Forrester's analysis →The PMM angle: If your product is sold through Amazon, your listing just became AI-discoverable in a fundamentally new way. If you compete with Amazon-listed products, the competitive landscape just shifted. Either way — structured product data, clear differentiation, and machine-readable positioning aren't optional anymore.
Sources: IBM Institute for Business Value (Jan 2026), Morgan Stanley (2030 projection), PYMNTS (2025 holiday data)
The numbers tell the story: 45% of consumers already use AI for at least part of their buying journey (IBM, Jan 2026). Morgan Stanley projects nearly half of online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030, accounting for ~25% of spending. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could redirect $3–5 trillion in global retail spend by 2030.
Meanwhile, traffic from AI sources to retail sites has surged 1,200% — while traditional search traffic declined 10% year-over-year.
Retail and grocery brands dominate early ad inventory. Criteo joins as ad tech partner. Truist estimates under $1B in ad revenue this year, growing to $30B by 2030.
Acquired for $2B in December, integrated in seven weeks — the fastest product integration in Meta's history. Also rolling to WhatsApp Business and Instagram Creator Marketplace.
The open standard for agentic checkout now backed by Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and Etsy. Google rolling agentic checkout into AI Mode and Gemini.
Plus: predicts $58B productivity shift from AI adoption. Rising +1,200% in our digest trend tracking this week — the biggest single-week spike we've measured.
AI-generated images produce 70% more content at the same cost. Best trading day in two years. The content cost curve is bending fast.
Multi-agent platform for document editing, approvals, and research. Another signal that the agent paradigm is going global, not just Silicon Valley.
The agentic commerce stack is forming in real time. Here's who's where.
Allie was one of the first to connect the dots between AI infrastructure and commerce at Amazon. Her newsletter breaks down the business implications of AI moves — not just the tech — which is exactly the lens PMMs need right now. Her recent deep dive on Shopify and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol is essential reading alongside this week's issue.
Follow The AI Economy →Last week we launched an interactive assessment that maps your team's AI maturity across Content, Competitive Intel, and Demand Gen. Over 500 PMMs have taken it so far. The average score? 2.1 out of 5. Six minutes. Eighteen dimensions. See where you stand.
Take the Assessment →