AI agents that research and buy products on a shopper's behalf — like Meta's Muse — are posing a conundrum for the big retailers, Reuters reported on November 4: let agents shop your store and you may lose the lucrative advertising brands pay for placement, plus the customer data that fuels it. Morgan Stanley researchers estimated in July that such agents could account for 10% to 20% of US e-commerce spending by 2030.

The two giants have split. Amazon banned Muse from its website in September, saying the agent appeared to have accessed its store without authorisation, capturing and storing customer credentials; Meta declined to comment. Amazon told Reuters this week that third-party agents should operate openly and respect service providers' decisions about whether to participate.

Walmart went the other way, rolling out infrastructure on October 21 to enable third-party agentic commerce and officially partnering with Meta's tool. The split is the shopping-agent question in miniature: the agent works for the shopper, but the store it shops in is an advertising business — and the two models do not obviously fit together.