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.
What to do about it, which is the paper's obligation once it has told you something.
- Matt Brazil For once, people were offered something they would never have to do again. A quarter of them said no.
- Ada Okafor Shoppers say they would hand over the groceries first. The firms building the software expect them to start with financial products.
- Owen Rhys Debenhams announced in February that it was the first UK retailer to put shopping inside the PayPal app. British shoppers could not use it until June.
- Tomás Reyes Walmart pulled out of AI checkout in March and it was read as a retreat. Walmart did not stop selling through AI. It stopped selling through somebody else's.