What if AI-agent shopping disintermediates retail brands and ad take-rates?
Autonomous shopping agents commoditize product discovery and route purchases on price, compressing brand pricing power and retail-media ad value and pressuring incumbent e-commerce economics.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Autonomous shopping agents commoditize product discovery and route purchases on price, compressing brand pricing power and retail-media ad value and pressuring incumbent e-commerce economics. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Consumer spending ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ · Robotics productivity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.