AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Voices & The Context
- The Format: Casual expert chat between two Morgan Stanley analysts discussing market trends.
- The Key Players:
- Brian Noak: Host and head of U.S. Internet Research at Morgan Stanley; leads the conversation with big-picture insights.
- Nathan Feather: U.S. Small and Mid Cap Internet Analyst; provides detailed analysis on consumer behavior and categories.
- The Vibe: Educational and optimistic—professional finance talk with forward-looking excitement about AI tech, low on humor but high on actionable predictions.
🗝️ Key Themes & Topics
The episode dives into agentic commerce—AI agents handling shopping autonomously—and its massive potential to transform e-commerce, backed by Morgan Stanley research.
- Topic 1: Agentic Commerce Opportunity. Analysts predict it could hit 10% of U.S. e-commerce by 2030, adding 100-300 basis points to growth, especially in high-friction categories like grocery and household essentials. Current gap: 40-50% use AI for research, but only mid-single digits for purchases due to immature tools.
- Topic 2: Shift in Shopping Funnel and Platform Value. Agents become gatekeepers, boosting social and video platforms for product discovery/awareness as reaching new customers gets harder. Grocery/CPG to drive over 50% of incremental e-commerce growth
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:21) **Introduction to Agentic Commerce**
- 2 (01:26) **Consumer AI Use Gap: Research vs. Purchasing**
- 3 (02:27) **Evolution of the Shopping Funnel**
- 4 (03:47) **Grocery and CPG as Major Unlocks**
- 5 (05:19) **Impact on Broader E-Commerce Growth**
- 6 (05:48) **Profitability Risks from Retail Media**
- 7 (07:08) **Search Platforms' Response to Agentic Shift**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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 Research
Nathan 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
More from this podcast
Thoughts on the Market →