Anthropic's Claude has started displaying product cards across multiple shopping categories including electronics, fashion, beauty, and pet products, according to monitoring by Retailgentic (Retailgentic). This represents an escalation of Claude's stated interest in "agentic commerce, where Claude acts on a user's behalf to handle a purchase," and marks Claude's upgrade from a research-only capability to a "Find" level on the agentic commerce autonomy spectrum (Retailgentic).
Adobe's latest retail data reveals that AI-driven retail sales accelerated to 138% year-over-year growth, with visits initiated by answer engines converting 54% higher than traditional traffic (Retailgentic). Most strikingly, Adobe reports that agentic commerce traffic could reduce product returns by 69%, suggesting that AI-mediated purchases result in better customer-product fit (Retailgentic). For commerce practitioners, these trends underscore the urgency of optimizing product data and catalog information for answer engines, as answer-engine-initiated traffic is growing faster than traditional search while delivering superior conversion and return metrics.
Meanwhile, Perplexity has been downgraded to research-only status after removing its buy capability and product cards, focusing instead on financial verticals and its Computer agent (Retailgentic). The competitive landscape is shifting rapidly, with adoption rates showing an 19-percentage-point gap between Gen Z (53%) and Baby Boomers (34%) in answer-engine usage, signaling that this transition will accelerate as younger cohorts dominate online shopping.