Jon Quast

The numbers were fine looking back, but investors have questions about what agentic commerce means for Shopify going forward.

It appears that there is a big change coming, an important restructuring, if you will, coming to e-commerce.

Just to take a step back, how is AI used in commerce right now?

Well, generally speaking, consumers are using AI to research what to buy.

But it's quickly moving towards a world where an AI agent is going to be told what to do, what to look for in a product, and buy it with your financial information on your behalf.

It's going to be able to handle the transaction from start to finish.

Shopify is building open-source infrastructure called Universal Commerce Protocol.

It's building this with Google.

This is open source, so this isn't necessarily a competitive advantage for Shopify.

It is something that Shopify will use, though.

Listen, I don't really know what this all means, to be perfectly honest, but let's consider a couple of changes that agentic commerce could bring.

First, why do you buy what you buy and click what you click?

Human decision-making is one thing, but how a machine is going to make decisions is another thing.

That's something that could really change e-commerce and digital advertising, for that matter.

Take a business like Pinterest.

Pinterest can understand trends and user intent because the searches are happening on its own platform.

With agentic commerce, this could be disintermediated from the platforms as people interact with

portals like Cloud or ChatGPT.

What we're saying here is, the Shopify numbers look great, but this is related to that whole SaaSpocalypse, AI is changing everything.

Ecommerce is about to change, and the question is, does it hurt or help Shopify?