The news: Microsoft is joining the agentic commerce arms race with the launch of Copilot Checkout.

• The feature—akin to ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout and Google AI Mode’s agentic checkout—offers a frictionless, end-to-end shopping experience. Users can move from a conversational prompt—such as “I need a pair of jeans for winter weekends”—directly to completing a purchase on Copilot.com, with the retailer remaining the merchant of record.
• Copilot Checkout is rolling out in the US with partners including PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, and Etsy. Shopify merchants will be automatically enrolled following an opt-out window, while merchants using PayPal or Stripe can apply to onboard.

Zooming out: Copilot Checkout is one piece of Microsoft’s broader push to embed AI across retail workflows, both online and in stores.

• Brand Agents, available to Shopify merchants, use a retailer’s product catalog to answer detailed product questions and engage shoppers in natural, brand-aligned conversations.
• The Store Operations Agent template, currently in public preview, combines internal signals such as sales trends and foot traffic with external factors including weather, local events, and holidays to deliver context-aware recommendations for staffing, KPIs, and operational priorities.

The broader context: It is still early days for agentic commerce.

• Our recently released AI platform-driven ecommerce forecast, which measures the impact of third-party AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, including onsite purchases and referred sales, expects AI platform-driven ecommerce sales to account for just 1.5% of total retail ecommerce sales this year, or $20.57 billion.