I spoke recently with Isabella Simonetti of the Wall Street Journal about the in
By Chris McCabe · November 3, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I spoke recently with Isabella Simonetti of the Wall Street Journal about the increasing interest around Amazon's 'blockade' of AI shopping agents like Meta's Muse or Elon's Grok-- and what it may mean in terms of Amazon's plans to control their customers' interactions with marketplace products.
I told Isabella “Maybe they don’t want to tip their hand, but I think Amazon’s just being territorial and rightly so, because I think they are going to make their own play for control of agentic commerce."
See screenshot, if you don't have a subscription to the WSJ.
I don't foresee a world where Amazon wants to be told what to do by other tech giants' shopping agents, nor have the buying experience impacted in ways they can't control by tools from other companies.
Especially when they clearly have big plans to dominate the future of agentic commerce with their own AI! And, especially when brands pay a boatload for ads to direct buyers' eyeballs toward their product listings.
It follows the pattern: the need to keep buyers on Amazon, and to keep them using Amazon tools, to keep interacting with them using homegrown AI.
Where the JP Morgan analyst commented that Muse 'has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT' I think the jury is still out on that. Amazon's Alexa for Shopping will have something to say about it before it's all over (among others, like Grok.)
Read full article here: https://lnkd.in/gehTUZN8
Specific projections/predictions/questions on how sellers will plan for the upcoming agentic commerce wars? Comment or DM! Thanks Isabella Simonetti!