Amazon already built the agentic future. You’re just renting space in it.

Rufus generated $12B in incremental sales last year. The brands inside Amazon’s walled garden are paying the rent.

A few weeks ago I wrote that almost every conversation about agentic commerce stops at the front door of the store. I still believe that. But there is a question sitting underneath it that matters more, and almost no one is asking it yet.

Everyone is debating how agents change the transaction. Faster checkout, better matching, less friction. That part is real, and it is coming fast. The question I keep asking is a different one: who ends up owning the layer between the brand and the customer?

Because in an agentic world, the customer no longer walks up to your store. They meet an agent first. And someone owns that agent. That ownership question is the whole game, and we are deciding it right now, mostly by not deciding it.

The agentic model already works. That’s not up for debate.

We can stop arguing about whether any of this works. It does. Amazon’s Rufus drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025, reached more than 300 million users, and made the shoppers who engaged with it 60% more likely to buy. That is not a pilot or a creative marketing spin. That is a fully operational sales channel, built and proven in under two years.

The fact that it works was never the surprising part to me. The $12 billion just tells me the experiment is over. Now we find out who it was really built for.

Inside the walled garden, every brand is a tenant.

Here is what the number does not tell you on its own. That value did not flow to the brands selling inside Rufus. It flowed to the company that owns Rufus.

Inside that walled garden, every brand is a tenant. Your discoverability, your positioning, your relationship with the customer: all of it gets standardized, genericized, and handed back to you with placement available for rent. The agent decides what surfaces, and increasingly what surfaces is whatever was paid for. Amazon now sells Sponsored Prompts, an ad format that lets brands pay to appear inside the agent’s own answers. The rent is not a metaphor anymore. It is a line item.

And the landlord can rebuild the property whenever it likes. In May, Amazon retired the Rufus name and folded it into Alexa for Shopping. The technology kept running underneath. Every brand inside simply adjusted, because no one inside got a vote. That is who controls the brand experience and the direct relationship with the customer, and it is not the brand.

What occurs to me is not that Amazon’s model is working. It is that the brands inside are paying for access to their own customers and calling it distribution.

The platforms are all building generic infrastructure. Your brand promise isn’t part of it.

It would be comfortable to file all of this under, “well, this is just what Amazon does.” Amazon has always been its own world, the reasoning goes, so this is an Amazon problem.

It is not.

As more agentic solutions arrive, the same pattern keeps reassembling. Whether the agent layer is owned by Amazon, Shopify, OpenAI, Google, or someone we have not heard of yet, the brand’s position inside it does not change. The platforms promising to help you control how you show up inside AI are still placing you inside their rails and their protocol. An agentic storefront you do not own is still a tenancy. The infrastructure being built is generic by design, and your brand promise was never part of the specification.

Unfortunately, this is bigger than just one AI-gate keeper.

The store is the one channel you still own.

I will not pretend to know exactly how this lands. No one can map it perfectly yet, and that includes me. But the answer to the question I opened with hardens before it becomes obvious, so it is worth getting ahead of.

Walk through an agentic purchase and watch where control goes. Discovery, comparison, recommendation, checkout. At each layer the brand gives up a little more, and everything runs on the platform’s terms.

There is one exception. The store. It is the one channel where the brand still owns discovery, positioning, and the relationship outright. In the first piece I argued that the store is where the brand earns the relationship. Here is the sharper version of that idea. The store is the only channel where a brand-led retailer is not paying rent on its own customer.

If I am certain of anything in all of this, it is that.

What I keep coming back to

So the question is on the table. Who owns the layer between you and your customer, and how much of that relationship are you willing to rent?

I have laid out the question. The case for where this goes, and where we are landing on it, is what we will get into on stage at Endless Aisle Live in London on June 17. If you are working through this in your own business, come find me there. I want to hear how you are approaching it.