As AI assistants increasingly influence — and even complete — online purchases, retailers are confronting an uncomfortable question: if an AI agent intermediates the transaction, who truly owns the customer relationship?
That concern is now driving collective action. A group of major retailers and technology leaders has formed the Shopper Context Protocol Working Group, an initiative designed to prevent brands from becoming invisible backends in AI-driven shopping journeys.
This move signals a broader shift in retail strategy — from competing on storefronts and apps to competing on context.
The Core Problem: AI Agents Strip Away Brand Memory
Third-party AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are quickly becoming shopping copilots. Consumers ask for product recommendations, compare prices, and in some cases allow AI agents to complete purchases autonomously.
According to a new Contentsquare survey, nearly one-third of consumers are willing to let an AI agent buy an item on their behalf. More tellingly, 43% say they are comfortable engaging with AI when it is seamlessly embedded into a retailer’s existing experience.
The risk for retailers is clear: many of these AI interactions begin with no awareness of brand loyalty, purchase history, preferences, or intent. When that happens, the relationship retailers spent years building can vanish in a single prompt.
Enter the Shopper Context Protocol
The newly formed working group is operating under the umbrella of the Retail AI Council, whose members include Adidas, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and other major brands. Their shared goal is to advance the Shopper Context Protocol (SCP) — an open standard designed to carry shopper context into third-party AI environments.
In simple terms, SCP aims to ensure that when a shopper interacts with an AI agent, their preferences, loyalty status, and intent don’t disappear just because the conversation happens outside a retailer’s app or website.
Andy Laudato, co-founder and chair of the Retail AI Council and COO of The Vitamin Shoppe, framed the issue bluntly: AI cannot be transformative unless it understands what shoppers want and why — in real time. Without context, AI becomes a blunt instrument rather than a personalized experience engine.
Why Retailers Are Collaborating Instead of Competing
Retail is not known for collective action, which makes this initiative notable. The reason is structural: no single retailer can solve the AI intermediary problem alone.
Major brands are already experimenting with AI-led commerce:
•Walmart is working with OpenAI to enable purchases through ChatGPT
•Etsy supports ChatGPT’s instant checkout feature
•Target has launched a beta experience inside ChatGPT
•Ashley Furniture is partnering with Perplexity for AI-native purchasing
These integrations may drive short-term conversion, but they also risk shifting long-term power to AI platforms unless retailers establish shared rules of engagement.
The Shopper Context Protocol is positioned as a counterbalance — an open, privacy-preserving standard that avoids proprietary lock-in and requires minimal technical overhead.
From “Agentic Commerce” to Contextual Commerce
The protocol builds on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, previously co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, which focuses on enabling AI agents to transact. SCP addresses the missing layer: identity, preference, and continuity.
Matt Howland, chair of the Shopper Context Protocol Working Group, summed up the challenge: without a shared standard, retailers are effectively blind to conversations shoppers are having inside AI tools. SCP is intended to let retailers participate meaningfully in those moments rather than being cut out entirely.
This marks an evolution from agentic commerce — where AI executes tasks — to contextual commerce, where AI understands the shopper as a persistent individual across channels.
What This Means for the Future of Retail AI
Three implications stand out:
•Customer data strategy becomes existential. Retailers that fail to preserve context risk commoditization.
•Open standards gain urgency. Proprietary AI integrations may scale faster, but they also concentrate power.
•The battleground shifts upstream. Discovery, intent, and preference modeling will matter more than checkout optimization.
In the long run, the winners in AI-powered retail may not be those with the flashiest assistants, but those who ensure their brand still “exists” inside the AI’s understanding of the shopper.
The Shopper Context Protocol is an early attempt to redraw those boundaries — before AI agents quietly rewrite them for everyone else.
Source: Based on reporting from Retail Dive