AI Commerce Weekly: Week 25, 2026
A quiet, supply-side week: two teams rebuilding the store for agents, a beauty industry betting on trust, and Britain finally getting a tipping point.
TL;DR
How about that, a relatively quiet week, and almost all of it happened on the supply side. Two well-pedigreed teams spent it building the same thing from opposite ends: a storefront whose customer is a machine. ShopAgentic raised to rebuild the merchant stack for agents; Adyen launched a layer to make that stack speak to every agent surface at once. Underneath, Alibaba.com and Oslo's Mimir showed AI quietly collapsing the cost of starting and running a commerce business. The demand side kept its counsel, with Koddi and the Shoptalk beauty crowd both naming trust as the last thing that holds. Then Google handed Britain a tipping point.
The store rebuilt for buyers who aren't human
The most serious bet of the week was also the smallest cheque. ShopAgentic closed a €1.9m oversubscribed pre-seed, co-led by May Ventures and Greenfield Capital, the latter a blockchain investor that has been quietly placing money on agent-to-agent payments for a while now. What makes it worth a paragraph rather than a line item is the pedigree. The founders, Alexander Ringsdorff and Kai-Thomas Krause, built CouchCommerce and went on to co-found the omnichannel platform NewStore. The angel list reads like a European commerce reunion: Spryker's Boris Lokschin, the former eBay Germany and OTTO chief Stefan Wenzel, Exciting Commerce's Jochen Krisch.
The product is described as a "native agentic commerce system", which in plainer terms means a squad of specialised agents, each owning one job end to end. One does catalogue, one does dynamic pricing, one does customer service, one does fulfilment, and the merchant sets the strategy and keeps a hand on the controls. It runs alongside your existing systems or standalone, and the team is aiming squarely at the roughly half of e-commerce that still runs on custom-built stacks. The honest caveats are the ones every pre-seed carries: the company is a few months old, the product is pre-launch, and the headline market case leans on a Deloitte forecast that agents will enable a quarter of global e-commerce sales by 2030 rather than on results anyone can point to yet. Ringsdorff's framing is the bit that stuck with me, though. "The entire front door of e-commerce is being rebuilt, and ShopAgentic is the system on the other side of it." Having spent years on stores designed for humans poking at screens, I find the inversion genuinely interesting: build the shop for the buyer who never sees it.
Adyen builds the universal translator
If ShopAgentic is rebuilding the store for agents, Adyen spent the week solving the other half of the problem: how an ordinary merchant talks to all of them at once. Adyen Agentic, announced in New York, is a three-layer suite of modular APIs pitched, in the company's own words, as a "universal translator". Agentic Feed pushes real-time catalogue, pricing and availability into conversational surfaces. Agentic Cart wires those surfaces back to a merchant's existing checkout, tax, fulfilment and order management. Agentic Payments handles the authentication, token portability and fraud across whatever protocol happens to be in play.
That last point is the strategy. Every emerging AI shopping surface currently runs on a different protocol, so each new channel means a fresh integration project. Adyen's response is studied neutrality: it is an early endorser of Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and Agent Payments Protocol and of OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, it is already compatible with Meta's AI checkout, and the pitch is that merchants "don't have to bet on which ecosystems ultimately win". Strategic partners are American Express, Mastercard, Salesforce and Visa; the launch retailers include French fashion house Sezane alongside ESW, Scheels and SharkNinja. The honest read for a UK team is that this is a US-first enterprise launch with no British availability yet, so file it as a watch item rather than a purchase order. But the integrate-once-stay-agnostic pattern is exactly the hedge you will want when the protocol war is still unresolved, and Adyen already runs payments for H&M and eBay over here. A processor positioning itself as the neutral switchboard between rival agentic standards is a more structural move than any single card-network announcement.
Recommendation becomes the battleground
The demand-side reading came from Koddi's State of Agentic Commerce (Media) report, covered by InternetRetailing and drawn from 750 consumers and 150 senior commerce media leaders across the US, UK and Germany. The headline shift is that visibility inside AI-generated recommendations is displacing traditional placement and impression advertising as commerce media's central investment priority. Seventy percent of leaders already use AI agents to analyse data and execute campaigns, 84% would invest to be more visible inside AI answers, and 92% plan to spend on agent-specific measurement. Koddi's Nicholas Ward describes the move "beyond traditional media buying models toward systems focused on decisioning and visibility inside AI-mediated shopping experiences".
Then the consumer half of the same survey applied the brakes, which is the part I would underline for anyone building a budget around this. Seventy-five percent of US consumers are happy for AI to help them choose what to buy. Only 20% are comfortable letting it choose and act fully on their behalf. That gap, between assistance and delegation, is the same one the British trust data kept showing us through Week 24, and it has not moved. The thing worth sitting with is that the industry's enthusiasm and the consumer's caution are both rising at once, and they are not the same curve. Sarah has written before about the cost of mistaking the first for the second.
Beauty's verdict: trust is the last durable asset
The fashion and beauty cut of the week came out of the post-show reporting from Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona, where agentic commerce was the defining phrase and trust was the recurring caveat. L'Oréal's Mark Elkins put it most cleanly: in a world where discovery, consideration, purchase and fulfilment can all happen through an agent, trust becomes a retailer's "last and most durable asset". The Estée Lauder Companies' Nadine Graf said trust has to be earned "again and again". Douglas Group's Rik Strubel made the observation that lands hardest for anyone running a store team, which is that AI-informed shoppers now arrive seeking validation rather than discovery, turning the associate from educator into validator.
The data the event produced points the same way and sideways at once. Bambuser's report found 74% of UK Gen Z believe AI will fully recreate the social experience of physical shopping. Pinterest said 69% of Gen Z now find visual search more helpful than text when buying. TikTok Shop reported more than 100,000 European businesses on the platform since its late-2024 EU launch, with daily GMV growing in triple digits between August 2025 and February 2026. Treat the platform-supplied numbers with the usual scepticism, but the direction is hard to argue with: discovery is scattering across visual and social surfaces, and the brands that win are the ones shoppers actively trust enough to seek out. Mondelez's Andrew Lederman supplied the line of the event, and it is a useful one to pin above a roadmap: "wherever the discovery experience goes is where the dollars will go."
The supply side keeps getting cheaper
Two smaller items rounded out the supply-side theme, and together they sketch what AI is doing to the cost of being in commerce at all. Alibaba.com released fresh data from its CoCreate Pitch competition showing that solo founders have jumped from 40% to 71% of entrants year on year, drawn from more than 15,000 applications across 132 countries. Of those one-person businesses, 89% call AI tools essential, and the 0-to-1 startup track built around Alibaba's Accio Work agent now accounts for 65% of all entries. It is vendor data from a self-selecting pool of AI enthusiasts, so I would not read it as the state of the wider SME base, but the London final in November and Accio's UK availability make it a real signal for the British marketplace-seller ecosystem. The same tools that let a solo founder design, source and market a product also feed the catalogues that agentic front-ends will one day read.
On the operations end, Oslo's Mimir raised a €518.3k pre-seed led by Sondo Capital, having grown roughly sevenfold over the past year and reached profitability before it ever took outside money. It handles around 250,000 customer conversations a month for some 60 brands across five countries, including the fashion names VILLOID and Holzweiler. The interesting bit is not the round, it is the direction: CEO Jorgen Vartdal Halse calls customer support "only the starting point" and is pushing into orders, deliveries and returns. The frontier of agentic CX is moving from deflecting tickets to executing the operational work behind them, and the credible challengers are profitable AI-native players rather than incumbents bolting a chatbot onto a legacy helpdesk. Small and Nordic, yes, but a clean read on where the category is heading.
Britain crosses the line
The week saved its most UK-shaped story for last. Google Cloud is calling British AI adoption a "tipping point", with the firms that were poking at AI tools in 2025 now wiring them into real processes and chasing real productivity. The framing comes from Maureen Costello, Google Cloud's VP for the UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa, around the company's London Summit, and retail is named in the lead pack. The proof point is a home one for me: Manchester's THG Ingenuity and its AI Shopping Assistant, reportedly delivering an 8x higher conversion rate. That is Google citing its own customer, so I would file the number under promising rather than audited, but the direction of travel squares with everything else we have logged this quarter.
The honest part of Costello's message is the part a technology leader should actually keep. Google's own research puts the productivity upside at roughly 20%, a day back each week, but she frames the pace as hinging on "skills, leadership engagement and trust", particularly around security and data sovereignty. "Technology is only half of the answer," she said, "people are the other half." That is a useful sentence to borrow for a board deck, because the "tipping point" framing gives you cover to move budget from pilots to production, while the constraints she names are exactly the ones that stall delivery once the money is approved. Plan for the skills and the trust now, not after the pilot is declared a success. Britain crossing from trying AI to running on it is the good news. Doing it without the governance to back it is how the good news turns into a remediation project eighteen months later.
Sources
The store rebuilt for buyers who aren't human
Adyen builds the universal translator
Recommendation becomes the battleground
Beauty's verdict: trust is the last durable asset
Bambuser, Pinterest and TikTok Shop figures are platform-supplied and relayed by the event coverage; treat as vendor data pending primary walk-back.
The supply side keeps getting cheaper
Britain crosses the line
THG Ingenuity 8x conversion figure is vendor-sourced (Google citing its own customer); promising but not independently audited.
Stay Connected
Follow LLCommerce on LinkedIn
Get the latest AI commerce insights, analysis, and industry news delivered to your feed.
Large Language CommerceAuthors
