Welcome to the first holiday season of the agentic era

Somewhere, someone this holiday season will type "present for my 8-year-old niece who is obsessed with sharks but somehow already owns everything shark-related" into an AI agent. A few seconds later, a recommendation surfaces for a scientific illustration of sharks, drawn in archival pigment ink and finished in watercolor, from an independent illustrator’s shop. It's a shop the buyer didn't know existed. And the match didn’t come from a single keyword. It was the result of the buyer describing what they needed. 

This is the first holiday season agentic shopping goes mainstream. A shopper can ask an AI agent to find a product, compare it, and buy it, without leaving the conversation. According to Shopify’s 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report, 65% of shoppers say they'll use AI for at least one shopping task this season. 71% of regular AI users are more likely to choose an indie brand this year than last, and shoppers that report using AI tools are also the most open to independent and niche brands.

Shopify merchants are already watching this show up in their sales. Brands like Stanley 1913, Cottonique, Aviator Nation, and Material Kitchen spent the year doing the crucial work of making themselves findable by machines. Shopify handles the foundation. Shopify Catalog structures a merchant’s product data so agents can read it, and Agentic Storefronts put those products in front of shoppers in AI channels like ChatGPT, Google, and Muse. What these brands built on top of that is what set them apart. The test that matters is legibility. Can an agent understand what you sell, who you're selling it to, and whether your brand can be trusted?

What does agentic-ready mean?

For more than a century, Stanley 1913 has evolved alongside its consumers, growing from an iconic outdoor brand into a global lifestyle brand spanning categories, markets and generations. As the way people discover and shop continues to change, AI-powered discovery is the latest chapter in that evolution. This year, that's meant five times as many AI-referred orders in the U.S. as the same window last year.

Getting there meant widening who owns discovery inside the company.

"Unlike traditional SEO where the work is entirely focused on what we can do directly on our site, we are seeing that agentic optimization requires us to take a broader view and look for ways to position our brand and product story in other authoritative sources," says Noah Gedrich, Senior Director of Commerce Technology for the brand.

"What used to be an onsite partnership between technology and content is now expanding to include our social media team, PR and data analytics people in order to increase our share of the agentic conversation in awareness, consideration and decision making."

Stanley 1913 isn't the only one watching its agentic numbers move. ILIA, the clean beauty brand that pulled the category from a niche concern into the mainstream, saw its AI-referred sales nearly triple year over year.

The equalizer effect for smaller brands

For years, being findable online meant speaking a language your customers didn't. A shopper knew what they needed. Traditional search engines needed them to describe it in the SEO terms brands paid to rank for, or optimized for with the help of specialists. Smaller, niche brands were mostly invisible unless a shopper knew exactly who they were looking for.

Agentic search changed that. An AI that can parse “my bra makes my skin burn” doesn't need a shopper to know the word “hypoallergenic.” It needs a brand that actually solves the underlying problem, and a shopper willing to describe that problem in their own words. Brands built around specific customer needs are advantaged in that world.

Cottonique is watching that shift show up in its numbers. The hypoallergenic apparel brand has seen its AI-referred sales grow 276% year over year, with its total sales up 52% from last year. 

“Our customers have never searched the way search engines wanted them to,” says co-founder Nikhiel Genomal. “Nobody with eczema types ‘hypoallergenic bra.’ Agentic storefronts helped close that gap. AI channels are the first search interface that has ever spoken our customers' language.”

The report backs it up: 81% of shoppers who use AI regularly are choosing more products this year because they feel personal, intentional, or considered. It’s an early sign of how differently shopping works when AI is the layer between shopper and brand.

Readiness with a reason to care

What we’ve seen in our research is that shoppers are using AI to research products before they make a purchasing decision. But they stop short of letting an agent autonomously complete a purchase for them. (Only one-third of shoppers say they trusted an AI agent to buy on their behalf.) That leaves a gap between the research and the sale.

Aviator Nation lives in that gap. The Venice-born brand sells tie-dyed hoodies for around $200. People buy it for the rich cotton blend, but also for the feeling it embodies about California, the seventies, and life on the waves. A brand like that has to be understood instead of just surfaced.

Says Curtis Ulrich, the company's Director of Ecommerce, “We're selling $200 hoodies. There needs to be some emotional connection as to why you will convert and buy this hoodie.”

That connection has to be visible before a shopper ever asks.

Curtis sees it as a handoff. “Someone might first connect with us through a real-life experience, then use our site, social or ChatGPT to find the product afterward,” he says. “All of those touchpoints can work together to bring them back to the brand and ultimately drive conversion.”

For Aviator Nation, that's meant leaning less on paid acquisition. “There are other ways to get in front of people and other digital touchpoints you can have outside of just continuing to hammer paid ads,” Curtis says.

The value of a dollar

This season, both savvy customers and their agents will be asking the same question: is this worth it, and can you prove it?

The reflexive merchant response is to discount deeper and earlier.

What Eunice Byun hears from her customers is more specific than “I want a deal.” Her brand, Material Kitchen, sells carefully crafted knives and cutting boards to people seeking something beyond the big-box-store version. She pays close attention to how they talk about money.

“People save up and are waiting for some of the best deals during Black Friday Cyber Monday, and they want to be savvy with how they're spending their hard-earned dollars during a season where they have to expend a lot,” she says.

But Eunice puts the job in terms of listening rather than promoting. “It's about refining and listening to what the customer wants and needs,” she says. “It's not about, ‘oh, I need all these discounts.’ It's ‘I want my dollar to go as far as possible this holiday season and give the gift that I want to give.’ So I think it's being respectful of your customers and their needs.”

In the survey 35% of shoppers choose products that are the best possible version for their needs, even if they aren’t the cheapest option. Eunice’s perspective is to stop treating the weekend as a race to the lowest price. "We really started to think about how to add a little bit more purpose and value behind it," she says.

The result is a holiday campaign Material Kitchen still runs, called Kinder Kitchens: customers get the best pricing of the year, but they can also redirect a portion of their savings to Heart of Dinner, a nonprofit that supports elderly members of the Asian community in New York and Los Angeles. The discount becomes a way to give something, not just get it.

All of this must be legible to an agent. If an agent is asked whether a knife is worth the price, it will compare the knife with others. Price is the part of that comparison the agent can see immediately. Anything else, why this one, who it is for, what the money goes toward, has to be written where the agent can find it.

The case a brand has to make

The brands in this piece already did the work. Being found gets a brand into the conversation. 

But a shopper still has to decide which product earns their money, and an agent can only repeat the case a brand has already made. The brands that win this season will be found by a machine and chosen by a person.

Dive into the full 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report!