Visa Drops the B2AI Report: When AI Becomes the Customer
Visa released its landmark Business-to-AI (B2AI) Report with Morning Consult, surveying 2,000 consumers and 512 business leaders. It defines a new commerce paradigm: market-to-machine.
Key stats from the B2AI Report:
- 77% of business leaders are already using or piloting AI.
- 53% would let AI agents negotiate prices with other AI agents on their behalf.
- 39% of Americans have made purchases they wouldn't have without AI agent recommendations.
- 58% are comfortable with AI comparing prices, but only 38% are comfortable with AI completing purchases autonomously.
- 48% of Gen Z trust payment-network-enabled AI versus 20% of Boomers.
- 36% trust bank-backed AI agents versus 28% for independent AI agents.
The report's thesis: commerce is shifting from human-driven to machine-driven, and trust is the new infrastructure layer. Frank Cooper III, CMO at Visa: "Commerce is moving from market-to-human to market-to-machine."
Visa x Ramp: Trusted Agent Protocol Goes Enterprise
Visa and Ramp expanded their partnership to deploy Visa Intelligent Commerce and the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol across Ramp's 50,000+ enterprise customers, including Shopify, Stripe, Fanatics, and Twilio.
AI agents can now handle corporate expense management, bill pay, and travel booking with Visa's authentication and fraud rails baked in. Ramp's enterprise base grew 133% YoY in 2025, and customers see a 62% decline in out-of-policy spending within two years.
Chris Newkirk at Visa: "Enterprises are looking for payment solutions that reduce friction, not add to it."
OpenAI x Smartly.io: Conversational Ads Come to ChatGPT
Smartly.io became OpenAI's first creative ad-tech partner, following Criteo as the broader ad-tech partner in March. They're bringing "promoted responses" - mini-chatbots that appear as small cards at the end of GPT-generated answers.
How it works: ads function like store clerks in a virtual shopping mall, only engaging when users are actively searching for products. Smartly optimizes creative in real-time based on conversation context. Entertainment, retail, and sports brands are in the pilot.
This is OpenAI's post-Instant Checkout pivot: ChatGPT becomes a discovery layer, not a checkout platform. Brands retain control over payment and fulfillment.
Macy's "Ask Macy's" AI Chatbot: 4.75x Spending Uplift
Macy's launched "Ask Macy's", a Google Gemini-powered chatbot, across all digital platforms. Shoppers who use it spend roughly 4.75x more than those who don't.
- Dark-launched in December, tested with about 50% of website visitors before full rollout on March 23.
- Most popular features: "Complete the look" outfit suggestions and virtual try-on.
- Attracts younger shoppers doing specific-intent searches.
- Context: Macy's had a 2.4% net sales decline last year but hit 1.5% comparable sales growth - an inflection point.
Max Magni, Chief Customer & Digital Officer: "The machine continues to learn." Development involved thousands of employee insights, with early tone problems iterated out.
Rezolve AI: 543% Growth and the "Architecting Agentic Commerce" Thesis
Rezolve AI (NASDAQ: RZLV) posted 543% H2 2025 growth over H1, FY2025 revenue at $46.8M, December MRR at $19.4M, and raised 2026 guidance to $360M. They have 950+ enterprise clients, 112.7B API calls processed, and $750M+ total funding.
Their 2025 Annual Report is titled "Architecting Agentic Commerce." The company is positioning as merchant-side infrastructure for the agentic era through their Brain Suite: a vertical stack combining a proprietary 30B-parameter retail LLM (brainpowa, built for zero-hallucination SKU-level precision), a conversational discovery layer (Brain Commerce, partly powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI), and an agentic checkout layer (Brain Checkout) that works across branded sites and third-party AI surfaces like ChatGPT.
The core thesis: merchants need to control how AI agents interact with their products, not cede that to platforms. CEO Daniel Wagner describes it as building a "bouncer at the warehouse door" for agents:
"You don't know my products. You are not going to disaggregate me from my customers. The best person to sell trainers to a consumer is the brand owner. But not ChatGPT, who's a generalist."
They acquired Crownpeak ($90M, enterprise DXP with ~400 deployments including Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Sephora) for distribution, and SmartPay for stablecoin-based instant settlement. Shoptalk demo results included 29x ROI at Eyebuydirect and 50% search-driven revenue growth at Rebag.
Parallel Launches "Eve" for Shopify
Parallel unveiled Eve, an AI reasoning layer for Shopify merchants covering multi-vector semantic site search, automated product discovery and personalization, merchandising, bundles, upsells, A/B testing, and CRO.
Early results: merchants are seeing up to 22.61% additional profit within roughly 3 months.
Juniper Research: Agentic Commerce to Hit $1.5T Globally by 2030
Juniper Research published its agentic commerce market study with 38,000 datapoints, a 5-year forecast, and two competitor leaderboards.
Key findings:
- Global agentic commerce spending projected at $1.5T by 2030.
- Currently limited to pilot deployments (2025-2026) before rapid scaling.
- Trust remains the #1 barrier to adoption.
- Traditional eCommerce checkout will persist as the dominant channel near-term.
Payments Infrastructure Leaderboard 2026: Mastercard, Visa, Stripe (14 providers evaluated on agentic flow capabilities and protocol participation).
Stripe's Shoptalk 2026 Recap: Three Pillars of Agentic Retail
Stripe's takeaways from 10,000+ retail leaders at Shoptalk:
Pillar 1: Discovery is the new storefront. 50%+ of OpenAI platform searches are discovery-based, and 70% of those include specific constraints. Sephora now uses loyalty data inside ChatGPT for personalized recs. Direct product feeds beat web crawling for agent-readable catalogs.
Pillar 2: Agents are expanding beyond chat. Meta launched a Facebook checkout flow on ACP (buy without leaving the app). New consumer brands are being built natively on agentic infra, cutting CAC. AI startups now cover every layer from catalog enrichment to post-purchase.
Pillar 3: Brand matters more, not less. When AI simplifies comparison, trust and affinity become the differentiators. New Balance spent $25M+ on store updates in 2025 for brand consistency. Stitch Fix launched an AI visualization tool using first-party data.
Stripe stat: 2-3% average conversion increase after adopting their optimized payment surfaces.
PwC's Shoptalk 2026 Recap: "Overhyped AND Underhyped"
PwC's analysis from the conference floor opens with the headline quote: AI is "simultaneously overhyped, in terms of the fear and anxiety it generates, and underhyped in terms of its long-term transformational potential."
Key data points:
- eMarketer projects 8.8% of e-commerce will be agentic by 2029. Merkle says up to 50% could involve agentic or answer-engine-driven transactions. A massive range showing no one really knows yet.
- 60% of shoppers who get AI product recs still do independent research afterward.
- 40% of Reddit conversations involve purchase or shopping decisions - human trust still matters.
- 86% of workers most exposed to AI job displacement with low adaptability are women (Brookings).
Vibe shift: the tone moved from 2025's confidence to 2026's humility. Executives are openly acknowledging uncertainty and seeking peer guidance rather than declaring victory.
