Now that agentic AI is handling shopping on behalf of consumers, the next step may be an AI-only shopping platform. A new collaboration between Visa and startup New Gen is exploring the possibilities in that direction.
New Gen has announced a platform for AI-native storefronts, enabling agentic commerce through AI-initiated transactions. In combination with Visa, the tool could help merchants launch full-service, AI-ready versions of their websites, allowing AI agents to shop and complete checkouts on behalf of users.
The result could be retail sites entirely invisible to consumers. Since agentic shoppers don’t need to experience websites the way humans do, this opens the door to storefronts that serve as minimal placeholders—structured purely for machine-to-machine interaction. These sites would provide access to product details and purchasing functions. By eliminating the need for design and user experience, merchants could even lower prices to AI commerce agents.
“Shopping agents don’t need to view a website with pictures and descriptions like humans do, which will lead to a next generation of e-commerce,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Services at Javelin Strategy & Research. “We’ll start to see e-commerce sites built specifically to be found and shopped by AI agents. For example, Target.com would launch ai.Target.com, a site that’s not viewable by humans but designed specifically to be navigable and shoppable by AI agents.”
A Fast-Growing Trend
The demand for AI-assisted shopping is growing sharply. According to New Gen, traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources increased by more than 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025.
This surge is happening despite the fact that today’s web infrastructure isn’t entirely compatible with AI’s programmatic interactions. Currently, AI agents are still unable to directly engage with most retail sites.
New Tools for AI
There are signs this is starting to change. Both Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platforms now enable AI agents to effectively act as personal shoppers.
Convincing consumers to entrust their payment data to an AI agent will likely require a deeper understanding of AI than many users currently have. However, as Apgar noted in a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, these tools could prove highly attractive to retailers.
“Can the merchant now offer agent incentives to buy at their store versus somebody else’s store?” Apgar said. “If Target and Walmart have the same item and Target is now paying a sales performance incentive fund to the agent to make that purchase at Target, the merchant has the ability to apply leverage to the automated shopping process.”
