AI agents are about to change how you shop—here’s what that means

Agentic AI is coming, whether you’re ready for it or not—a PwC survey published earlier this year found that 88% of U.S. companies are beefing up their agentic AI budgets, and a broad majority have adopted AI agents in some capacity. 

When it comes to using AI agents for shopping or in the commerce space, more than half of consumers are or will be doing so by the end of the year. But many people still aren’t quite sure how or when to use AI agents. They may not know where to find them, how to prompt them, and in some cases, if the agent they are interacting with is legit or potentially a disguised bad actor.  Fetch, an AI firm founded in 2017 in the U.K., is trying to make the transition to using AI agents for everyday tasks a bit easier and smooth out some of those issues. 

On Wednesday, the company launched three new products: ASI:One, a new LLM interface for interacting with agents; Fetch Business, a portal allowing brands and companies to claim and verify brand agents (similar to a social media-inspired verification system); and Agentverse, a directory and depository of more than two million AI agents.

Perhaps the most interesting new product, from a layman’s perspective, is ASI:One, an interface in which users can interact with AI agents and prompt them to perform certain tasks—such as book a vacation with all flights and hotels, or “buy me new shoes,” which would prompt specific brand agents for airlines, hotels, and even shoe brands to assist the user. 

Humayun Sheikh, Fetch’s founder & CEO, thinks that the interface will help people learn to utilize AI agents and navigate the agentic AI space in a similar way that Google helped people learn to navigate the broader internet decades ago. “Google created discoverability and trust for websites. We’re creating the same foundation for agents,” he said in a statement provided to Fast Company. 

There are already more than 1,000 verified brand agents on the platform, including companies such as Costco, Alaska Air, Pepsi, and Adidas. That means that users can interact directly with those agents—in a way that they may interact with a human employee—to get information related to prices, product information, and more.

The hope, as Sheikh puts it, is that Fetch’s platform will help connect consumers directly with brands through agents and help create a new ecosystem in which AI agents have more utility to the general public in a more personal and pragmatic way. Further, Fetch hopes the “personal” element of its platform will help get consumers more specific information—differing from broader LLM models, such as ChatGPT.

“Instead of just finding information, your personal AI coordinates with verified brand agents to get things done,” Sheikh said. “This isn’t searching for options separately and hoping they work together; it’s orchestration. Your personal AI understands how you make decisions, then works with brand agents that have real inventory, pricing, and booking capabilities.”

AI agents are quickly moving from an abstract concept to everyday utility. Fetch is betting that clarity, trust, and verification will be the missing ingredients that help people some consumers who have been holding back on adopting the technology embrace it. If the company succeeds, the way we shop, book, plan, and interact with brands could feel less like surfing the web and more like delegating to a capable assistant—one that actually follows through.

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