On 20VC this week, Harry Stebbings asked Harrison Chase (LangChain CEO) the ques
By Brett Bohannon · October 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
On 20VC this week, Harry Stebbings asked Harrison Chase (LangChain CEO) the question every retail media person should ask.
If an agent shops for you, the business loses its ads and its upsell, so basket size drops. Why would agent-to-agent work?
His answer: put the ads in the agent's response.
"Hey, I found these three things. You might also wanna consider this other thing."
Earlier he said providers will expose their own vertical agent and horizontal agents (ChatGPT, Claude) will talk to it, because the app knows your behavior better and has a ton of APIs.
By that logic Amazon is the most obvious vertical agent there is. Nobody has more shopping data or more APIs, and it's already building it (Alexa for Shopping).
He treated ads as a patch. I think ads and cross-sell are the reason the vertical agent gets built.
Sponsored Products becomes an agent-to-agent API. Same inventory, delivered as "you might also consider this" inside someone else's agent conversation.
Retail media doesn't die in the agentic shift. It gets re-exported through an agent interface.
For sellers, your listing is the input: attributes, bullets and reviews get summarized.
One brand test so far: thin listings with no bullets got "not listed" answers from Alexa, and it stated wrong facts about the product.
Who owns the ad slot when your customer's agent talks to Amazon's agent?