Etsy and Wayfair are already processing agentic checkout through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. OpenAI and Stripe shipped a competing one. Cart and checkout are becoming infrastructure services — and the standards war is already here.
I published a prediction deck about the agentic web last September. Six months later, some of it looks prescient, some of it looks naive, and the most important developments weren't in the deck at all.
Everyone spent 2024-2025 experimenting with AI features. Q1 2026 is when the survivors figure out what actually works—and kill what doesn't.
Every e-commerce platform is racing to add AI features. But what if the real opportunity isn't AI features—it's AI architecture? What if the store itself could generate in real-time?