AI shopping agents could quietly change who actually controls product discovery

I went pretty deep into AI shopping for a documentary and came away thinking ecommerce businesses may be looking at the wrong part of this shift.

The obvious story is that AI makes shopping easier for consumers.

The more interesting one is what happens when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or another agent decides which products even make it into the consideration set.

If that happens, brands aren't only optimizing for people anymore. They're also optimizing for an intermediary that may compare price, reviews, availability, returns, shipping and product data before the customer ever sees the store.

That potentially shifts a lot of power away from the retailer and toward whoever controls the agent.

For ecommerce owners here, do you see this becoming a meaningful acquisition channel, or is agentic shopping still mostly hype?

I made a documentary tracing where this is heading if anyone wants the full argument:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-0CriLzyOo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-0CriLzyOo)