Tag Archives: advertising

Agentic Reality: Advertising

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The hype machine behind agentic commerce is at its apex. Every week brings another protocol announcement, another pilot, another prediction that autonomous agents will soon do our shopping for us. For payment executives trying to separate signal from noise, here is the signal: the first real agentic business model is not autonomous checkout. It is advertising.

What Is Actually Working: AI Inside the Retailer

AI is making great strides within the retailer’s own domain. Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, and Michaels’ “Mike” are conversational agents built by retailers, trained on their own assortment and category expertise, driving basket sizes up over 35% in the best implementations. Amazon told investors that Rufus helped generate nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales, with monthly active users up 115% and users 60% more likely to complete a purchase (Bain & Company, “Agentic AI in Retail: How Autonomous Shopping Is Redefining the Customer Journey,” May 2026). Michaels took “Ask Mike” from concept to production in six weeks on Google Cloud, as I covered in Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”.

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Google Ads in the Agentic Era: Merchant Center Becomes the Center

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Great article in Search Engine Journal surrounding the shift in Google Ads: the product feed is no longer just a catalog. It’s becoming THE primary bidding signal.

This shift matters for payments strategists because it reveals how Google is positioning itself as the orchestration layer for agentic commerce. The advertising infrastructure and the commerce infrastructure are converging, and Merchant Center is the “last mile” integration point to merchant data from store level product inventory, to pricing, to SKU level purchase feeds (for measurement).

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The Power to Price

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The best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.

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PayPal Advertising?

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Yesterday PayPal announced PayPal Ads Manager

“PayPal Ads Manager gives tens of millions of small businesses access to high-margin ad revenue while creating valuable new inventory for advertisers of all sizes.”

“Retail media networks have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that generates high-margin revenue by enabling businesses to sell advertising on small business websites and apps”

As the Founder/CEO of Commerce Signals we brought card data to market primarily for measurement (now part of TU). It gave us a view of how advertisers performed and what data was valuable. I went into great detail on the challenges of  JPM’s Retail Media network in my June 2025 blog  Understanding How Payments Data Plays in Advertising (2025), and more generically in my 2021 blog Data Games. 

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Understanding Payments Data – How it Plays Today and the Near Term Future

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I thought it was time for a payment data update. Given Paypal’s Feb 2025 investor day, JPM’s “Retail Media Network” now re-labled Media Solutions and JPM’s lawsuit against Transunion/Argus. My perspective is formed from my 8 yrs as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals. I’ll touch on signals, intent and agentic at the end. 

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Pricing Agentic: Economic Models for a New Kind of Demand

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$4B market opportunity (18 mo), who will lead it?

Today’s blog covers possible pricing models and market structures for agentic transactions, a new type of demand (purchase order with a payment instrument). Retailers may despise the idea of a new aggregator, but they can’t say “no” to a PO by their customer. US retailers spend over $400B on marketing ($90B of which is digital marketing). There is no CAC for an agentic transaction.. While the daily innovations of AI and Agentic is fascinating, it is the economics and structures for pricing value that will influence participation, value creation and market success.

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