Walmart’s deal with ChatGPT should worry every small e-commerce business: Your website is living on borrowed time in the age of artificial intelligence

Four months ago, he was industry veterans Discussing whether AI shopping agents can disrupt Amazon and Walmart’s dominance. Today, retailers themselves are racing to build the infrastructure that makes these agents possible. That’s how fast this is moving.

For the past 25 years, the retail location has served as sacred territory. Brands controlled the narrative, captured data, and turned browsers into buyers. AI-driven shopping agents are about to do to websites what e-commerce did to storefronts: not eliminate them, but fundamentally change their purpose.

Analysis of more than 20 million shopping agent conversations using AI revealed an unmistakable pattern. Consumers aren’t just experiencing conversational commerce; They prefer it to more important purchases. In electronics alone, buyers ask 50% more questions before purchasing than any other category. When retailers deploy AI shopping agents for these complex products, they see 25% engagement rates and 10 times higher conversions than traditional website experiences.

High-interest purchases — the ones that generate the most margin and require the most customer service resources — are already moving to conversational interfaces. Laptop buyers, furniture shoppers, and your customers looking for the perfect gift aren’t browsing through product grids anymore. They ask questions, compare features with natural language, and expect instant intelligent guidance.

I recently watched this transformation happen in real time. At a summit of more than 50 retail executives from brands like WayfairLenovo, and Foot lockerwe had a live debate: Will AI agents replace websites in 10 years? Initially, 82% of attendees defended the site as irreplaceable. After hearing the evidence regarding engagement data, conversion metrics, and changing consumer behavior, sentiment changed enough that the pro-agent argument won out. These retail professionals realized that AI fundamentally separates two functions that their websites have always combined: discovery and transaction.

Your website will still be around a decade from now. But it won’t be the only transaction engine. It will be your brand showcase, your content hub, and your trust-building destination. Meanwhile, the actual shopping, including the searching, comparing and purchasing that consumers do, will increasingly take place in AI agent environments, whether that be ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or brand-owned conversational experiences.

Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are all rolling out or piloting features that enable AI agents to handle e-commerce transactions without users ever leaving the platform. When a consumer can research products, compare options, read composite reviews, and complete purchases all within a single conversation thread, navigating to multiple websites, opening countless tabs, and searching through product filters becomes unnecessary friction.

Forward-thinking retailers who understand this shift are already building what I call “agent infrastructure.” These are the systems, data architecture, and conversational capabilities that allow AI agents to access their catalog, understand their brand voice, and transact on behalf of customers. They are treating AI shopping agents the same way forward-thinking retailers treated e-commerce 25 years ago.

This comparison is important. In 2000, when Ralph Lauren Invested $200 million in e-commerce address in (Print) Daily Mail He declared that the Internet was “just a passing fad.” This move seemed risky. A decade later, this bet continues to pay off as the brand “Evidence of recession“Its digital dominance continues to this day. Today’s AI moment requires similar courage, and the stakes are just as high.

There are no experts in AI trading yet. We’re all builders in these early days, testing hypotheses and learning what works. But some retailers are testing, iterating, and gathering insights from every conversation their AI agents have, while others are waiting for certainty that will never come. The gap between these two groups will determine who will own retail in the next decade.

Data from early deployments of AI shopping agents tells a clear story. When purchases require careful consideration, consumers increasingly prefer conversational commerce over self-service browsing. They want to ask follow-up questions and make comparisons explained in clear language. They want the kind of guided shopping experience that mimics a knowledgeable store associate, not a product database. And they want it on demand, not just during business hours. Your website cannot provide this experience. An AI agent can.

Consumer behavior and the tech giants investing billions in AI commerce have already written the script. Twenty-five years ago, retailers who dismissed e-commerce as a fad learned an expensive lesson. Today, retailers who dismiss conversational commerce as hype will learn the same thing. The difference: The window to experiment, learn and build is shorter. AI is moving faster than the web ever will.

Your website doesn’t disappear. But if you think the version that worked for the past 10 years will work in the next five, you’re betting against the way your customers want to shop.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com reviews are solely those of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs luck.