For years, we’ve talked about omnichannel commerce as connecting places where co
By Ethelbertwilliams · September 26, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
For years, we’ve talked about omnichannel commerce as connecting places where consumers shop. What Amazon announced at Accelerate suggests the next phase may be about connecting the operating system behind all of them.
Amazon is opening Seller Central so sellers can manage listings, orders and profitability across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, TikTok Shop and eBay from one workspace. More than 95% of independent Amazon sellers already sell across multiple channels, so Amazon is effectively saying: manage your business here, even when the transaction happens somewhere else.
Then there’s the AI layer—Amazon’s new Selling Partner plugins allow sellers to connect their Amazon business directly to Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon Quick. Seller Assistant is also evolving from answering questions toward proactively analyzing inventory, advertising, listings and compliance, then recommending or, with permission, taking action.
Put those announcements together and something bigger is happening: commerce is moving from dashboards to agents, and from channels to connected operating systems.
That idea has been everywhere this week. At Groceryshop, conversations have centered on conversational shopping, agentic commerce and transforming the enterprise to support AI-powered experiences. And NIQ reported today that 51% of U.S. consumers used an AI-powered tool to support shopping in the past month.
Having spent years operating across Amazon, Walmart, marketplaces, DTC, retail media and performance marketing, I know how much organizational energy goes into stitching together platforms, reports, agencies, inventory, media and decisions.
AI has the potential to collapse much of that complexity.
The strategic question for brands is therefore bigger than which AI tool to adopt. It’s whether your data, workflows, measurement and teams are ready for a world where agents increasingly analyze the business, recommend actions and eventually orchestrate execution across platforms.
That changes the capabilities I would prioritize for 2027 >>> Build product intelligence that travels across ecosystems, create measurement that sees the whole business rather than individual channels, establish governance for agentic decisions, and redesign roles around judgment and growth rather than dashboard management.
There’s an interesting tension here too. As AI interfaces become more open, the platforms underneath them may become more strategically important. Amazon doesn’t need every transaction to happen on Amazon if it can become infrastructure through which merchants manage commerce elsewhere.
The next platform battle may not be about owning the channel. It may be about owning the operating layer connecting all the channels.
That’s a much bigger vision than omnichannel —another signal of what I’ve been exploring through The Next Basket: AI isn’t simply changing how consumers shop. It is beginning to redesign how commerce leaders must operate.