Their AI just bought something, but were you the brand it chose?

The checkout button is disappearing, and like most things AI, it's happening at an alarming rate.

Something quietly significant happened recently, and I don’t think most marketers have fully processed it yet.

OpenAI started letting people buy products directly inside ChatGPT. Not “here’s a link, go check it out.” Completed. Purchased. Done. It’s live with Etsy sellers now, and Shopify brands like Glossier, Skims, and Spanx are next in line.

And that’s just OpenAI.

Visa just launched its Trusted Agent Protocol. Mastercard launched Agent Pay. Google has AP2, backed by 60+ companies, including PayPal, Shopify, Salesforce, Cloudflare, and Klarna. Coinbase built its own protocol for crypto-native agent payments. Every major player in the payments industry is scrambling to answer the same question: when an AI agent clicks “buy,” how do we know it’s authorized to do that?

This is not a 2027 thing; it’s happening now.

So what does an “agentic payment” actually look like?

You tell your AI assistant: “Get me the best yoga mat under $100, and just buy it.” The agent searches, evaluates, selects, and completes the purchase. You never see a checkout screen. The numbers behind this shift are staggering: generative AI traffic to retail sites grew 1,300% year over year during the 2024 holiday season. On Cyber Monday alone, it spiked nearly 2,000%.

The AI isn’t just influencing the decision anymore. It IS the decision.

Here’s where this gets real for you.

For the last few years, the AI Search conversation has been about visibility — will your brand show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question? That was already urgent. But this new layer changes the stakes dramatically.

It’s no longer just: will AI mention my brand? It’s: Will AI buy from my brand?

If an agent is purchasing a yoga mat, a SaaS subscription, or a compliance checklist on someone’s behalf, it’s not clicking through ten websites and reading reviews. It’s working from what it already knows. The brands it trusts. The brands it has been trained — through content, citations, and authority signals — to recommend.

That’s AI Search optimization. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the difference between being in the consideration set of an autonomous buyer, or being invisible to it entirely.

And now the part that should keep every marketer up at night.

We have spent years building multi-touch attribution models. First touch, last touch, assisted conversions, view-through, the whole messy, expensive apparatus of trying to understand how a customer got from awareness to purchase. The quantity of hours of my life I gave up back in Agency days to this very topic are countless!! (The office martini cart helped!)

In an agentic commerce world, first touch IS the transaction.

There’s no funnel. No nurture sequence. No retargeting window. The agent asks a question, gets an answer it trusts, and buys. The consumer was never really “in” the journey at all. And, as an industry, we’ve invested a massive amount of time and money in attribution infrastructure that assumed a human was moving through stages. That assumption is now breaking.

What this means practically: the brand that wins the AI’s recommendation wins the sale. Not the brand with the best retargeting campaign. Not the brand that spent the most on paid search. The brand that built enough authority, enough structured content, enough genuine signal — that when the agent went looking, it already knew who to pick.

The old fear was losing a click; the new reality is losing the sale entirely before a human ever gets involved.

One more thing worth noting.

Klarna famously replaced 700 customer service agents with AI, declared victory, then quietly started hiring humans back when satisfaction tanked. The lesson the entire payments industry keeps relearning: AI plus humans beats AI alone. The brands that will win in an agentic commerce world aren’t the ones going all-in on automation and hoping for the best, they’re the ones building real authority — content, trust signals, structured data — so that when an AI agent goes shopping, it already knows who to pick.

By the way, that’s what we help brands build at FOMO.ai.

If you want to understand how your brand shows up, or doesn’t, in AI Search, and what to do about it before agentic commerce goes mainstream, schedule a 1:1.

Dax Hamman is the CEO & Co-Founder at FOMO.ai, the author of 84Futures, and an expert in AI Search & Marketing.