This week, Shopify made a major bet on the future of e-commerce with their agentic commerce suite—Catalog, Universal Cart, and Checkout Kit. These tools are designed to let AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI search recommend and complete purchases without ever sending customers to your website.
Shopify's vision is clear: they believe the future of commerce is chatbot-led, not brand-led.
We see it differently.
Here's what our data shows: Most AI-driven traffic today isn't landing on product pages. It's finding your blog posts, guides, and educational content. Customers aren't searching for SKUs—they're searching for answers. And they still want those answers to come from brands they trust.
This creates two critical challenges for brands navigating the AI commerce landscape:
First: How do you ensure your content surfaces effectively within AI platforms, and how do you convert those visitors when they do arrive at your content?
Second: How do you serve your loyal customers who increasingly prefer to ask questions and make purchases through conversational interfaces rather than traditional browsing?
This is precisely the infrastructure challenge Varia AI is solving. We're building the foundation for companies to win in AI discovery and deliver AI-native customer experiences that keep your brand at the center of the relationship.
The future of commerce will be conversational—but it doesn't have to be brand-agnostic.
Questions about how this impacts your brand strategy? We'd love to discuss.
Deep dive into what this means for consumer brands