Shopping agents are positioned to become invisible sales conversion engines. As OpenAI, Perplexity, and others race to capture this trillion-dollar opportunity, the future of how consumers search and buy hinges on how these platforms will make money, and how their algorithms will decide which products to show consumers (or buy on their behalf). The answers will determine whether these chatbots deliver on their promise of personalized commerce in their truest and most authentic sense — or become a more sophisticated version of today’s pay-to-play search and commerce platforms. Their strength as a conversational interface, capable of understanding complex requests, makes them well-suited to complete purchases without users ever visiting a physical or digital store or leaving the conversation. An emerging Agentic AI commerce ecosystem now stands at the ready to help advance their ambitions. The speed at which the GenAI chatbots have amassed an audience shows the potential for how these models could upend the retail and commerce status quo by changing where consumers start their searches and end by making a purchase without a lot of steps or friction in between. As AI agents increasingly handle the search and presentation of results (or completed sales), traditional retailers risk becoming invisible in the commerce ecosystem altogether. In this world, payment credentials might emerge as the real winner as embedded offers, financing, rewards and other data-driven incentives become an invisible part of the transaction. The venture capital pouring into these platforms signals expectations for massive adoption and ROI. GenAI represents a new form of commerce orchestration across marketplaces, social signals and retail inventory through a simple and single conversational interface. The unique nature of conversational AI suggests that different approaches might not just be possible but necessary to compete. LLM platforms can build on GenAI’s growing sense of user trust, its potential for creating a distinctive new shopping and buying utility and its ability to monetize these new forms of value. How these models present recommendations and act on behalf of users presents new challenges because of their current lack of clarity — and new opportunities because of what they could become for the entire commerce ecosystem. And that could reshape how retailers and the ecosystem adapt their products and platforms to drive sales. For retailers and brands, that now means competing for both customer and AI attention. Retailers will need to ensure their inventory, pricing and product information are optimized for AI crawling and decision-making algorithms. The winners in this new era may be those who recognize that when conversations drive commerce, trust itself becomes the product. And that monetizing trust comes wrapped around a different business model.