AI's going shopping for you. Which retailers will make the basket? 

Meta's personal AI agent, Muse, has spent the last few months doing some serious legwork. Since its launch, Muse has overtaken ChatGPT as the top free app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play in the US, and its ability to browse, compare and buy stuff on a user's behalf has forced retailers to pick a side.

Shopify said 'yes' to Muse. Chief executive Tobi Lütke confirmed a deal letting Muse complete purchases across Shopify-powered stores through Shop Pay, and the shares jumped across two sessions on the news.

Walmart and Best Buy have struck similar arrangements, letting Muse browse and buy directly from their catalogues, and PayPal has signed on as a payment partner too, though that integration isn't live yet. Amazon took the opposite view, blocking Muse from its marketplace over compliance concerns, a decision Morgan Stanley's retail team flagged as carrying its own risk if a meaningful share of shoppers start buying stuff through agents instead.

Elsewhere, retailers whose models lean on renewal inertia and repeat subscriptions rather than one-off transactions, including Five Below and Etsy, screen less favourably under Morgan Stanley's framework, since agentic browsing tends to reward retailers with deep product and payment integration over those relying on habit.

The more interesting comparison sits outside the US entirely. Alibaba's Qwen app has been going 'full stack' almost from the get-go. It was the first platform to adopt Alipay's Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, letting users order food and drink without leaving the chat, and Alipay's agentic payments have already cleared more than 120 million transactions in a single week. To find out what Qwen (pronounced 'Chewen') can do, watch this:

Qwen also runs on open-weight models anyone can self-host. Alibaba has built a separate agent, Accio Work, aimed squarely at small exporters, a use case Muse doesn't touch. Muse's edge is trust architecture: an isolated secure virtual machine, an approval gate for sensitive actions, and a password vault Meta says the agent itself cannot see.

That gap matters for judging whether Muse actually succeeds. Qwen's transaction volume is a real revenue signal already running through Alipay's rails; Muse's equivalent, a newer, US-only integration with Link by Stripe, hasn't published comparable numbers yet. The figure worth watching next isn't app store ranking, it's completed checkouts and merchant sign-ups, since that's where agentic shopping turns from a novelty into a true shift in market share.

For investors in retail, the strategy here, since this is such a new space, could be sector rotation rather than a single stock call. This is especially important since there is a bifurcation taking place. Alibaba is going deep on a closed loop it owns, natively executing purchases and tasks; Meta is going wide with a general-purpose agent that can route around apps it doesn't own. See the diagrams below.

Retailers with tight payment integration, Shopify chief among them, look better placed to capture agentic flow than those defending share through loyalty programmes alone. AMD and Intel have also caught a bid on the assumption that more agents running in the background means more inference and chip demand, a theme likely to keep resurfacing every time a new agent launches.

Companies mentioned: Meta Platforms, Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, PayPal, Best Buy, Alibaba, Five Below, Etsy, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel