Day 3: Agentic Commerce Takeover: LLMs and Agents Are Putting Consumers First - Who is Taking Care of Brands?
OCT 08, 2025
GROUND
Welcome to Day 2 of the Agentic Commerce Takeover - a limited series designed to prepare the next generation of brands to own their voice and define how they show up and grow as we shift from the DTC era to the Agentic era.
Last week, OpenAI quietly flipped the switch on a technology that’s about to rewrite the rules of commerce distribution. In an instant, the world’s most powerful shopping assistant came online - and the brands that move fastest will lock in organic placement at the protocol layer of the next retail internet.
In yesterday’s Day 1 of the limited “Agentic Commerce Takeover” Series, we covered the news, and how winning brands won’t necessarily be the biggest the most organized. For more on those strategies, keep reading…
What Just Happened: OpenAI Launches Instant Checkout
On September 29, 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
U.S. users can now:
Discover products
Ask questions
Compare options
Complete purchases
…all without leaving the chat. Etsy merchants are already live; Shopify merchants are next. The window to establish organic placement is open — but it won’t stay that way.
Today vs. Tomorrow: What Transacting on ChatGPT means for DTC brands
🟢 Today
The reality is that brands must start building for Agentic Commerce nowyesterday. It’s no longer enough to simply run ads or optimize SEO - brands need a deliberate strategy for how they’ll appear inside LLM-powered conversations. This is the entry point: ensuring your brand can show up in these new discovery environments. But this is just the beginning.
Soon, the winners won’t be the brands that merely “appear” in the chat. They’ll be the ones that shape, steer, and own the conversation - setting the terms of engagement rather than passively being surfaced.
Side Note: For Brands, Q4 Shouldn’t Just Be About BFCM in 2025:
In the immediate present: If your entire BFCM strategy is still concentrated on Meta and Google ads, you’re already playing catch-up. Great brands - from emerging challengers to giants - win not just by spending smarter, but by anticipating tectonic platform shifts and positioning themselves early.
🟢 Tomorrow
Today, ChatGPT (OpenAI) acts as the dominant LLM and data layer, mediating how consumers discover and interact with brands. But the next phase is coming fast: agents will evolve into full-fledged operating systems. We’re moving from a world where humans prompt AIs to one where AIs prompt the world for us - a single intelligent core connecting to countless agents and devices, always one step ahead.
What does the future mean for brands?
Diminished direct access to customers
Weaker brand loyalty
Increased dependence on intermediaries who now control the consumer interface (had a problem with Meta? Enter OpenAI)
In this future, commerce won’t happen on platforms - it will happen throughintelligent intermediaries that orchestrate everything: discovery, recommendation, transactions, retention.
The issue is no one is building for brands in mind - it’s all with consumers first. So how do brands control THEIR customer data when it’s presently owned and leveraged by OpenAI? What does the ‘DTC’ mean for brands in an AI-first world?
Brands that don’t proactively define how to use their DTC for Agentic Commerce readiness will lose distribution power
🔌 Ready to position your brand for the agentic commerce revolution? Ground AI is building the infrastructure that helps DTC brands win organic placement before this becomes pay-to-play. Let’s talk strategy.
Don’t miss your chance to act on Agentic Commerce. Book a demo with Ground to see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance.
🧰 Your Agentic Commerce Readiness Checklist
There’s still a window to ensure your brand shows up in the conversation - to take the critical steps that determine whether you’re discoverable or invisible.
This isn’t a future state - it’s live right now. Here’s what you should be doing today:
1. Audit Your Product Feed
Is your data structured, complete, and up to date?
Clean titles, descriptions, and specs?
High-quality images (min 800×800)?
GTINs and standard identifiers included?
2. Verify Your Tech Stack
Shopify or Etsy = already eligible
Stripe payments = ACP backbone
Real-time inventory updates in place?
3. Optimize for Discovery
Descriptions that match natural language queries
Variant info (size, color, material, gender) clearly listed
Return policies and shipping terms easy to find
4. Get Familiar with ACP
Read the Agentic Commerce Protocol docs
Understand how agents evaluate and rank
Map how your products would appear in a chat query
5. Consider API Integration
Design APIs to handle order payloads from ChatGPT
Map conversational orders to Shopify / ERP flows
Ensure fulfillment, accounting, inventory are connected
📚 Resources