By Jamie Brennan · · Updated 5 July 2026
AI is starting to do the shopping. Here's what it means if you're not Bunnings
Agentic commerce has landed in Australia: AI agents that search, compare and check out for a customer. Big retailers are split between joining in and blocking it. Here is what the shift means for a Melbourne business that isn't a national chain.
Something quietly shifted in Australian online shopping over the last few weeks. On 17 June, Google switched on AI shopping in Australia first in the Asia Pacific, letting people buy from inside Google Search, AI Mode and the Gemini app, starting with Kogan, Bunnings, Adore Beauty, Petbarn and The Iconic. ChatGPT has its own Instant Checkout. Mastercard, Visa, Microsoft and Google have all launched agent payment frameworks. And in one pilot, as Information Age reports, an AI agent used a Commonwealth Bank card to buy Event Cinemas tickets on a shopper’s behalf, run through Matilda, a Melbourne-built model.
The through line is worth sitting with. Increasingly, the thing doing the buying is not a person clicking around your website. It is an AI acting for them.
This is not a far-off scenario. A PayPal survey found 48% of shoppers have already used AI assistants to search for products, and 61% say they would trust an AI’s recommendation. Traffic to retailers from generative AI tools jumped nearly 700% late last year. The behaviour is arriving faster than most businesses are ready for.
The big retailers are revolting, and that is the tell
Not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat. Amazon has blocked AI firms from scraping its catalogue. eBay is banning agents that place orders without a human review. One security firm found more than 1,800 websites now treat AI bots as unwelcome by default.
It is worth understanding why they are fighting, because the reason matters more than the fight. Whoever the customer talks to owns the relationship. If a shopper asks an assistant and the assistant picks the product, the retailer quietly becomes a warehouse and the AI becomes the shopfront. The revolt is not really about technology or scraping. It is about who the customer belongs to.
You are probably not Bunnings. The shift still reaches you
Most Melbourne businesses are not about to wire themselves into a checkout protocol, and you do not need to this month. If you are a plumber, a physio or a furniture showroom, none of the above is a to-do for Monday.
But the deeper change reaches you just the same. An AI is increasingly the layer sitting between you and a customer who is comparing their options. We wrote about the first half of this when it was only about being found, in getting found in AI search and why your business is invisible in AI search. Agentic commerce is the same problem with money attached. The question is no longer only whether an AI can find you. It is whether it can understand you well enough to recommend you, book you, or buy from you.
What actually helps: be legible to the machine
The businesses an AI surfaces are the ones it can read cleanly. The work is practical and mostly unglamorous.
- Structured data. Mark up your products, services, prices, hours and location with schema.org so an agent reads plain facts, rather than trying to guess them from a screenshot of your page.
- One source of truth for the basics. Your price, availability, opening hours and contact details should say the same thing on your website, your Google Business Profile and any directory. Agents cross-check, and contradictions are an easy reason to drop you.
- Reviews and real detail. Agents lean on reviews and specifics, the dimensions, the materials, what is actually included. A thin listing loses to a complete one every time.
- A fast, readable site. The same speed and clean markup that help a human help a machine. A slow, heavy page an agent cannot parse is simply invisible to it, which is another version of what a slow website already costs you.
- Decide your stance on purpose. Some businesses will want agents transacting on their behalf. Others will want to stay the point of contact and never hand that over. Either is fine, but it is a strategy call worth making deliberately, not by accident.
The func.digital take
Agentic commerce is early and noisy, and you do not have to chase every new protocol to stay in the game. But the ground under “how customers find and choose you” is genuinely moving, and the businesses that do well over the next few years will be the ones an AI can find, trust and act on.
The good news is that the work to get there is the same work that already makes you easier for humans: clean data, honest and consistent information, a fast site, and a clear decision about where your customer relationship lives. None of it is exotic. It just has to actually be done.
If you are not sure how your business looks to an AI right now, that is exactly what a free digital systems audit is for. We check whether your site, your data and your listings are legible to the tools that are now doing the searching and, increasingly, the buying, and we tell you what to fix first. Get in touch before your competitor is the one the assistant recommends.