What Is AI-commerce?

AI-Commerce refers to transactions where either the buyer, the seller, or both parties are AI assistants.

The most usual example is an AI assistants that acts on behalf of the consumer—searching, evaluating, comparing, and transacting products or services with different levels of human oversight.

Buyer: I'm looking for new running shoes. Please find me the store with the lowest price for my favorite pair in size 10, with stock and within 10 miles.

Assistant: Running Lane has your shoes on stock on blue and black colors. Here are some pictures. The store is 4 miles away, a 5 minutes drive from here and they are priced at $110. Would you like me to order them for pickup for you?

Buyer: Yes please. Buy the shoes in blue for pickup. Use my digital wallet for payment.

Assistant: The order has been fully processed. The blue running shoes are waiting for you.

Buyer: Thank you

Ark Invest calls it the new consumer operating system.

Inserting Ads Into Your Personal Chat Is Intrusive

Now imagine that this conversation had gone this way instead:

Assistant: Running Lane has your shoes on stock on blue and black colors. Here are some pictures. The store is 4 miles away, a 5 minutes drive from here and they are priced at $110. And Shoes Unlimited has a promotion for running shoes, BOGO 50% off, only for online orders. Would you like me to order the shoes at Running Lane for pickup or would you like to place an order online at Shoes Unlimited?

If you found the second response off putting, you're not the only one. In a recent study, participants found the use of ads embedded in LLM responses to be manipulative, less trustworthy, and intrusive (arXiv:2409.15436 [cs.HC]).

Two Shifts Rocking The Advertising Boat At The Same Time

The advertising industry is about to get hammered with two massive shifts happening at the same time.

Shift #1: You're not advertising to humans anymore

The reality is that businesses are not advertising to humans anymore. They are advertising to AI assistants. And AI Assistants consume products in a whole different way.

Out go the flashy pictures and fancy models. In goes the structured json data with specs, tags, and descriptors.

Companies like Velou are doing just that: providing Product Data Infrastructure for Agentic Commerce.

Shift #2: You own the discovery algorithm

Today, when you search for a product, you discover the products that Big Tech wants you to discover, based on who has paid them the most.

With AI agents acting as buyers, product discovery happens on your device, on your terms, and under your conditions. You get to decide which products you will find, like in our example above, where the buyer laid out very specifically to the AI assistant the kind of shoes she was looking for.

This is obviously a big threat to Big Tech revenues, and they are already circling the wagons:

Amazon locks down against Google’s AI shopping agents.
— The Information, July 30, 2025

Shopify adds AI agent guardrails to protect its business model.
— eMarketer, July 15, 2025

The Opportunity: Direct Connections Between Buyers and Sellers

AI-Commerce represents an unique opportunity to optimize the market for buyers and sellers, removing intermediaries that add cost and noise. This will result in lower costs for sellers and more genuine options at a lower cost for buyers.

With AI assistants, product discovery is not centralized anymore and every business has the opportunity to present itself in front of the buyer, at the right time.

Synvya is building the open, agent-native rails for AI-commerce: identity, discovery, and transactions — with no middleman. Visit synvya.com and follow us for more on how how're building a direct, merchant-owned agent channel with verified identity and low-friction payments.