AI Agents Reshape E-Commerce and Pricing

Generative AI agents are increasingly acting as commerce gatekeepers, collapsing discovery into a few curated options and raising the stakes for merchants to maintain structured catalogs and clean metadata. At the same time, AI-driven search often produces shallow or incomplete results that frustrate shoppers and reduce brand visibility and engagement. To help physical retailers bridge the digital gap, platforms such as Lightspeed Showroom use AI to create custom-branded, easy-to-manage online storefronts that blend in-store presence with digital convenience. AI pricing systems are also transforming commerce by enabling dynamic, data-driven price adjustments and controlled experiments—practices companies like Amazon and Uber have popularized—to optimize revenue and respond quickly to market changes. SaaS vendors adding AI features face pricing challenges: many default to cost-plus credit systems while hybrid models (mixing seats, usage credits, overages and subscriptions) are emerging to balance predictability and upside. Buyer anxiety about unpredictable spend and credit-system opacity create adoption barriers, so successful vendors emphasize predictable plans, transparent metering, modern billing infrastructure, and semantic readiness to avoid being excluded from agent-driven discovery.