“It’s not only going to change the customer experience,” Sherri Haymond, Mastercard’s global head of digital commercialization, told me just outside Mastercard’s booth. “It’s already changing the way retailers are thinking about product selection — the way they merchandise.”

She added that the company is creating tools for merchants to take advantage of this move to AI and is continuing to listen and learn from retail partners as this space keeps changing quickly.

The conference kicked off this past week with Google announcing its new Universal Commerce Protocol, a new standard for agentic commerce, and Microsoft unveiling its Copilot Checkout feature.

At Microsoft’s booth, Mallory Manolis showed me how Copilot Checkout worked, with a shopping experience and (of course) checkout embedded into the company’s Copilot AI agent. She said the team intentionally includes a specific retailer’s name in the buy button — like, say, a local bookstore — as an important way these businesses can maintain a close connection with their customers even in the new world of AI chats.

“We want any merchant, big or small, to surface their product to millions of Copilot users,” she said.

Teams from both Microsoft and Google discussed at the conference how AI-powered shopping could be integrated both inside their own agents’ chats and also on retailers’ websites.

Scot Wingo, CEO and co-founder of ReFiBuy, which works in the AI commerce space, said the speed of innovation today is unlike anything he’s seen in his 30 years working in retail. With AI agents prioritizing context and content, smaller boutique shops who tell a story about their products have a big opportunity to shine as AI shopping takes off.

“I think this resets the whole playing field,” he said.

On another section of the show floor, I met Chase Alexander, a solutions engineer for Verkada, which makes security camera and door access controls. He showed me how his company, too, was integrating AI to make searching through video archives much easier. He added that Verkada ensures its using new AI tools with a foundation of privacy and protecting user data.

“I think it’s really interesting the number of markets it’s getting deployed into,” he said. “I think we learn every day how powerful a resource it is. It’s just a matter of time before it touches every industry.”