The Playbook

If you sell anything online, the useful question this morning is not whether to build for AI shoppers. It is whose rails you would be building on. Britain's first agentic checkout runs through an American payment layer and a startup's app. Joining is cheap. Find out what leaving would cost before you sign.

If you are being sold agent-readiness this quarter, ask the vendor for a transaction share rather than a projection. The only current figure any operator has put its name to is three per cent, and it came from a company that sells the infrastructure.

If you buy things, the practical bit is the permission settings. The consumers in this research did not ask for smarter agents. They asked for spending caps, instant revocation and easy cancellation. If a product you are offered has no visible way to stop it, that is the finding, not the small print.

And a correction we would welcome. If you know of a second British retailer running agentic checkout, or of anyone who has published a usage number for the Debenhams Group deployment, tell us. We looked and could not find one, which is not the same as there not being one.