Amazon’s Buy for Me: a huge step toward the agentic internet

The retail giant is helping consumers buy products from third-party sites—within the Amazon app. The implications for brands and tech stacks are enormous.

Amazon just announced a new feature, Buy for Me, that lets users complete purchases from third-party brand websites directly within the Amazon app. The feature uses an AI agent to find the product, fill in required details and place the order, without redirecting the user or leaving Amazon. It’s a direct implementation of agentic commerce: AI completing multi-step tasks across systems, under user instruction. The customer sets an intent, the agent carries it out, and the platform integrates external supply into a unified flow.

Other companies have announced, or intend to, agentic purchasing tools. But Amazon’s is massively significant for a couple of reasons. First, Amazon is Amazon—the 800-pound gorilla of e-commerce.

Leaders must pay attention to Amazon’s agentic AI for another reason as well: it signals a profoundly changing relationship between brands and platforms. And the shift isn’t limited to retail; it will affect the financial services, life sciences, travel and hospitality, and healthcare sectors, among others. Understanding and adapting to this change is crucial for businesses to maintain their market relevance.

Amazon’s agentic AI and platform consolidation

What Amazon is doing here is both task execution and interface consolidation. AI takes on the complexity of the fragmented digital infrastructure, translating intent into action across external domains. But control, oversight and the experience layer remain centralized. The consumer interacts with a single gateway, and the AI works across everything else.

The result is platform consolidation. Inventory, fulfilment and product data come from third parties, but the platform owns the relationship, captures the data and defines the experience. For brands, this means exposure without direct access. For platforms, it extends reach without the need to scale logistics or inventory. For customers, it reduces friction while preserving agency.

This structure has competitive implications. As we noted in our recent research, New minds, new markets, companies that want to remain accessible to customers via AI agents will need systems that can be read, interpreted and acted upon by those agents. That means standardized product data, structured metadata, API-based access to payment systems and minimal reliance on manual user inputs.

Design priorities will shift. Retail websites will no longer serve human users alone; they’ll also need to be compatible with third-party agents. This entails legible layouts, clear product information and interfaces that don’t rely on visual cues. Brands that want to appear inside agent-mediated ecosystems must structure their digital infrastructure to be machine-readable and agent-operable.

New brand considerations across industries

All this change will require trade-offs. Brands that participate in these systems will give up parts of the interaction layer. They may retain fulfilment, but the interface, discovery and even parts of the transaction flow will be controlled by another platform. In return, they’ll get access to aggregated demand and increased exposure. The cost will be reduced differentiation.

These trade-offs present fundamental strategic considerations for businesses across many sectors. Each brand will need to evaluate whether the undeniable reach and potential sales volume offered by platforms hosting AI agents, such as Amazon, justify the accompanying loss of control over the customer interaction and the potential dilution of brand identity.

This calculation won’t be straightforward and will depend heavily on a brand's market position, target audience and core value proposition. For some, particularly those competing on volume or convenience, participation might become essential for visibility. However, other businesses, especially boutique firms or luxury brands predicated on exclusivity and a highly curated customer experience, might make a conscious strategic decision not to participate.

Choosing to remain outside consolidated platform ecosystems could become a deliberate tactic to preserve brand equity, maintain direct customer relationships and reinforce a sense of scarcity or distinction in the market. This decision itself will become a component of a brand strategy.

Amazon’s Buy for Me also demonstrates how intent-based design works when paired with agentic execution. The user signals a need and the product they want, and the agent does the rest. But the system doesn’t assume or infer more than that. It acts within fixed boundaries. This is not yet an autonomous shopping assistant with open-ended authority but a constrained, goal-specific agent working within a predefined interface, under user supervision.

(And make no mistake, that supervision is important. In our research, the average Comfort Quotient for using AI to buy products was just 27 out of a possible 100. Even among Early Adopters, consumers generally more open to automation, the score only rose to 34.)

There is no significant loss of visibility. The user can still inspect the details, intervene in the process or redirect the flow. But the point is that, increasingly, they won’t need to. And that change in effort, moving from active navigation to passive confirmation, will affect how customers perceive the value of brand-owned channels. Unless those channels offer something distinctly different, the pull to use consolidated interfaces like Buy for Me will grow stronger.

A changing value proposition

Buy for Me and similar tools are fundamentally changing where value sits. The agent becomes the executor, the platform becomes the interface, and the brand becomes the supplier. The customer is still in control, but they are no longer doing most of the work. If they trust the interface, they delegate more to it. Over time, that creates structural dependencies.

This sets a clear baseline for what agentic commerce looks like in practice: task execution that spans systems, is mediated by AI, and remains under user control, while also consolidating the point of access.

The agentic internet is already forming. What Amazon has introduced is one early operational layer of it.