Amazon is caught in a bind. After spending months blocking AI shopping agents from scraping its site and even suing Perplexity for unauthorized purchases, CEO Andy Jassy is now quietly hiring for strategic partnerships in 'agentic commerce.' The contradiction reflects a stark reality: the e-commerce giant either adapts to the agent revolution or risks getting left behind by the very AI powers reshaping how people buy things online.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy watched it unfold. Back in June, he told employees that AI agents would start infiltrating everyday life, "from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks." By October, on an earnings call, he'd shifted the narrative. Amazon would partner with third-party agents, he said, without naming names.
Then came the job posting. Amazon is now recruiting a principal corporate development officer specifically to forge strategic partnerships in "agentic commerce." The move exposes a widening tension inside one of the world's most dominant tech companies: how to profit from - or at least survive - a technological shift that could fundamentally reshape how people shop.
Here's the threat. OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and Microsoft have unleashed shopping agents that let users skip the Amazon app entirely. Instead of browsing products, you tell an AI what you want. The agent scans the web, finds the best deal, and completes the purchase without you ever leaving the chatbot. It's frictionless shopping, and it cuts Amazon out of the loop.
When someone buys through ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, OpenAI takes a small transaction fee. Retailers lose the direct customer relationship. "With an agent on ChatGPT, retailers risk relinquishing transactions on their site to pay a toll on someone else's highway for the same transaction," said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.
The numbers are staggering. McKinsey projects agentic commerce could hit $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030. Morgan Stanley analysts expect nearly 50% of American shoppers will use AI agents by then, potentially adding $115 billion in e-commerce spending. These aren't niche numbers. They're market-defining projections.
Amazon's response has been schizophrenic. The company recently hardened its website defenses, blocking external AI crawlers from scraping its data. It's blocked 47 bots total - basically every major player. Then, in November, Amazon actually sued over its , alleging the startup concealed its bots to scrape Amazon without permission. Perplexity shot back, calling it a "bully tactic."
