About this episode
Our Head of U.S. Internet Research Brian Nowak joins U.S. Small and Mid-Cap Internet Analyst Nathan Feather to explain why the future of agentic commerce is closer than you think.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Brian Nowak: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Internet ResearchNathan Feather: And I'm Nathan Feather, U.S. Small and Mid-Cap Internet Analyst.Brian Nowak: Today, how AI-powered shopping assistants are set to revolutionize the e-commerce experience.It's Tuesday, February 17th at 8am in New York.Nathan, let's talk a little bit about agentic commerce. When was the last time you reordered groceries? Or bought household packaged goods? Or compared prices for items you [b]ought online and said, ‘Boy, I wish there was an easier way to do this. I wish technology could solve this for me.’Nathan Feather: Yeah. Yesterday, about 24 hours ago.Brian Nowak: Well, our work on agentic commerce shows a lot of these capabilities could be [coming] sooner than a lot of people appreciate. We believe that agentic commerce could grow to be 10 to 20 percent of overall U.S. e-commerce by 2030, and potentially add 100 to 300 basis points of overall growth to e-commerce.There are certain categories of spend we think are going to be particularly large unlocks for agentic commerce. I mentioned grocery, I mentioned household essentials. We think these are some of the items that agentic commerce is really going to drive a further digitization of over the next five years.So maybe Nathan, let's start at the very top. Our work we did together shows that 40 to 50 percent of consumers in the U.S. already use different AI tools for product research, but only a mid single digit percentage of them are actually really starting their shopping journey or buying things today. What does that gap tell you about the agentic opportunity and some of the hurdles we have to overcome to close that gap from research to actual purchasing?Nathan Feather: Well, I think what it shows is that clearly there is demand from consumers for these products. We think agentic opens up both evolutionary and revolutionary ways to shop online for consumers. But at the moment, the tools aren't fully developed and the consumer behavior isn't yet there. And so, we think it'll take time for these tools to develop. But once they do, it's clear that the consumer use case is there and you'll start to see adoption.And building on that, Brian, on the large cap side, you've done a lot of work here on how the shopping funnel itself could evolve. Traditionally discovery has flowed through search, social or
