This holiday season, shoppers will hand AI assistants their wish lists, complete with budgets, delivery deadlines and must-have details. When prompted, agents will narrow thousands of options to a handful in seconds. A majority (65%) of shoppers plan to use AI for at least one holiday shopping task, according to Shopify’s 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report.
Whether your brand surfaces in agentic commerce hinges on the systems behind your storefront. However, many enterprise retailers rely on systems that were built for a different era, with years of custom code piling up and disconnected channels splintering the view of the customer.
As the holiday season approaches, global brands, from upstarts to household legacy names, are beginning to rethink their commerce platform for the AI age. Lauren Nemeth, vice president of global enterprise at Shopify, shares what an AI-ready, unified commerce foundation looks like and how it helps brands keep the customer relationship, wherever the sale starts.
Clearing the hurdles of AI visibility
AI channels are becoming real discovery engines for Shopify merchants. As of Q3, AI-referred traffic to Shopify storefronts was up 2.6x year over year, and orders grew even faster, up 3.3x. Among those storefronts, Stanley 1913’s AI-referred orders in the U.S. grew 5x year over year, and clean beauty brand ILIA’s AI-referred sales nearly tripled.
AI-referred shoppers also begin their journey closer to the finish line. AI channels send them straight to product pages at 3x the rate of organic search, and they convert 64% more often.
But to earn those AI-referred orders, retailers have to clear three hurdles: legibility, reach, and identity.
When it comes to legibility, an agent can only recommend what it can read, and what it reads is structured product data. The more complete and accurate the data, the better.
“LLMs should understand not just that you sell brown women’s cowboy boots, but every product detail to enhance discoverability for shoppers,” Nemeth said.
That detail pays off at checkout. Shoppers referred from structured Shopify Catalog data converted at twice the rate of those from scraped feeds, Shopify found.
The hurdle of reach can be difficult to navigate, as new AI platforms launch constantly, and building a connection for each one adds upkeep.
“Muse, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini: All of those are managed through a unified Shopify integration,” Nemeth said. “As a result, developers experience less toil and are able to spend more time on the shopping experience itself.”
Nemeth said that brands often underestimate the third hurdle: identity.
“Integration costs are coming down dramatically but the risk of losing customer identity due to inaction is increasing,” she said. Merchants oftentimes do not know who the consumer is behind the agent. Nemeth recommends that brands invest in data unification before switching on any AI channel.
Familiarity leads to follow-through
While many shoppers are keen to ask AI for gift ideas, hesitance toward AI-driven purchases remains. Only about one-third of shoppers say they trust an AI agent to buy on their behalf, Shopify reports.
Retailers have found a way to close that gap by offering familiarity in the form of a recognizable checkout screen that has their details saved. For example, buyers with a Shop identity, the account behind Shopify’s Shop Pay, convert at about 1.6x the rate of those without one.
That familiarity now follows shoppers into AI agents. In Meta’s Muse, buyers can check out with Shop Pay, and the brand stays the merchant of record and can recognize the buyer.
“The Shop Pay consumer ecosystem is a proven force multiplier,” Nemeth said. “There are over 400 million Shop Pay users, and they are 77% more likely to make repeat purchases. This provides meaningful conversion uplift.”
More ways to shop, fewer moving parts
Shoppers rarely stick to one channel.
For years, enterprise brands met that complexity with complexity, adding custom systems channel by channel. The upkeep piled up: roughly 72% of IT spending goes to maintenance, according to Gartner.
Now, AI is forcing a rethink.
“We’ve talked about the promise of unified commerce for the better part of a decade,” Nemeth said. “That said, very few enterprise brands on legacy stacks have realized that value.”
Merchants are now looking to consolidate their in-store, online and agentic systems into one centralized stack, Nemeth explained. Retailers with sprawling store fleets have the most disparate parts to consolidate, too. For example, David’s Bridal runs more than 190 stores on one system: Shopify.
Bonobos has also found success in running its website and 48 in-person Guideshops on Shopify. This helps store associates provide a customer with a seamless shopping experience, ringing up online orders in a single in-store transaction. Bonobos, in turn, is able to easily track that customer’s data across multiple purchase touchpoints.
There’s no one-size-fits-all path to success
Nemeth has met with hundreds of merchants in recent months, and she hears the same themes across the board.
“Replatforming can be expensive and time consuming for merchants,” she said. “But the opportunity cost of being on a legacy platform with disjointed consumer experiences and no real AI moat is no longer tenable. This is a serious risk to the long-term viability of many businesses. Globally, brands are saying the time to make the change is now.”
A full migration delivers the biggest payoff: one system and one view of the customer across every channel. But that isn’t always feasible. In those cases, brands can start with incremental, impactful changes.
For example, ALICE + OLIVIA started small, launching Shop Pay within its existing checkout. Shop Pay quickly became the brand’s most-used payment method, at 35% of orders. The brand realized that replatforming fully to Shopify was best for its business and made the full move in just 10 weeks. Lululemon also brought Shop Pay to its customers last month. Brands on other platforms can put products into AI channels alongside their current stack with Shopify’s Agentic plan.
With the holiday rush upon retailers, Nemeth suggested using the season to study how AI shoppers browse and buy to inform future strategy, bearing in mind the hurdles of legibility, reach, and identity.
“You don't have to boil replatform to reap the Shop Pay, identity or agentic benefits of Shopify,” Nemeth said. “The best enterprise decision start with discovery and action.”
Reach shoppers everywhere they buy, from AI chats to social feeds to your stores. Talk to Shopify’s enterprise team.
