Search the website
EN

AI Commerce Wars and the Battle for Your Shopping Journey 

Media That Matters, Optimove’s weekly series highlighting essential stories shaping the future of Positionless Marketing

Read Time 4 minutes
Posted in

Elevate Web Marketing with Real-time Web Push

This week’s stories explore the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered shopping. Pinterest’s CEO shares why fully autonomous AI agents are still a long way off, while the company works to improve personalization and tackle low-quality, AI-generated content. At the same time, industry giants like Amazon, Google, Walmart, and Shopify are entering a new phase of the “AI commerce wars,” racing to build shopping agents and protect their customer relationships from competitors. 

1- Pinterest CEO says agentic shopping is still a long way out 

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 8/8/2025 

On its Q2 earnings call, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said fully autonomous AI shopping remains far off, as users aren’t yet ready to let agents make purchases for them. Instead, he positioned Pinterest as an AI-powered shopping assistant, using personalized recommendations, visual search, and multimodal AI to inspire purchases.  

The company is also addressing rising concerns over AI-generated, low-quality content and flawed moderation systems, which have led to mass account bans and user frustration. In response, Pinterest has introduced labels for AI-created images and new filters that allow users to hide generative AI content from their feeds. 

2 – The AI Commerce Wars Have Begun 

Jason Goldberg, Forbes, 8/8/2025 

AI “commerce wars” are heating up as Amazon, Google, Walmart and others race to build agentic shopping assistants that can complete purchases across sites while blocking rivals from accessing their data. Amazon has barred competitors’ bots like Google’s Mariner and ChatGPT from scraping its site while developing its own agent, Rufus.  

Shopify, Walmart, OpenAI, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Perplexity are pursuing similar strategies, balancing defense with building their own closed ecosystems. The shift could disrupt retail media, affiliate marketing and attribution models as transactions happen inside walled gardens controlled by AI agents. 

In Summary

AI is transforming the shopping journey from inspiration to transaction, but the road to fully agentic commerce is far from complete. While some companies are focused on refining user trust and content quality, others are building closed ecosystems to control the future of AI-driven retail. The winners will be those who combine innovative technology with strong customer relationships and responsible AI practices. 

Check back next week for another roundup of Media That Matters.  

For more insights on Optimove, contact us.

Published on
Posted in

Rob Wyse

Rob Wyse is Senior Director of Communications at Optimove. As a communications consultant, he has been influential in changing public opinion and policy to drive market opportunity. Example issues he has worked on include climate change, healthcare reform, homeland security, cloud transformation, AI, and other timely issues.

Get new blogs directly in your inbox

Related Blogs

Avoid the Stackpocalypse: Walk the Untraveled Roads of the Martech Ecosystem

In 2014, I became the Digital Marketing Manager for a software company. One of my first orders of business was to evaluate our marketing technologies and decide which we should keep, which to drop, and which to bring on board. I looked at our “MarTech stack,” identifying what we were using and how, and my … Continued

20 June 2019   |   Rony Vexelman
Bold vs. Hesitant iGaming Players

In real-money games, some players make their first deposit immediately upon registering, while others can take weeks or even months before depositing any money. What impact does this period—the length of time until their first deposit—have on the player’s subsequent lifecycle and spend patterns? Does it impact the amount of money they ultimately deposit or … Continued

15 July 2015   |   Yohai Sabag
How FDJ United Rewrote the Rules with Positionless Marketing

Why it Matters: In reading this blog, marketers will learn how FDJ United, a gaming and sports betting operator with 33 million players around the world, transitioned their marketing to Positionless Marketing. The result is that today they can do more with less: taking less time, less budget, and fewer hands. Positionless Marketing for them … Continued

27 May 2025   |   Rony Vexelman

Get a personalized tour of Optimove

Let us show you how to go from tens to hundreds of segments