In the week leading up to Black Friday, group chats stop behaving like group chats and start behaving like project-management dashboards with better memes. One friend live-blogs lightning deals from her desk. Another hurls screenshots of “doorbusters” that suspiciously resemble last week’s prices with extra exclamation marks. A cousin creates a color-coded Google Sheet with tabs for “kids,” “parents,” and “wildcards.” And somewhere between all of that noise appears a new participant who never sleeps, never impulse-buys and never gets offended: the AI assistant.
As we note at YourNewsClub, this is the first holiday season in which AI feels less like a novelty and more like a fully embedded operator inside America’s most chaotic seasonal ritual. The assistant remembers every “TV deals under $600” search you ran this week. It knows your mom hates clutter, your dad hoards loyalty points like treasure and your sister will buy that viral pan the moment it dips below $80. It can read more product pages in 30 seconds than you can over an entire weekend. And it has no emotional stake in the drama you ignore all year.
Bain estimates that up to a quarter of some retailers’ referral traffic now flows through AI agents and auto-responders. The share is still below 1% of total traffic, but conversion rates are unusually high – enough to force retailers to reconsider how their websites are structured. Many are already rewriting product pages in formats that are easier for LLMs to parse; some are even building “invisible” pages intended for bots rather than humans. Analyst Maya Renn, who studies the evolving ethics of computational systems, argues that “retail now has to speak the language of algorithms as fluently as it speaks to the customer.”
McKinsey projects that long-term “agentic commerce” – autonomous workflows where AI anticipates needs, compares options, negotiates prices and completes purchases – could reach hundreds of billions of dollars. According to Adobe’s 2025 survey, 52% of U.S. shoppers plan to use generative AI this season, often to offload tedious tasks like comparison shopping, price tracking, coupon hunting and gift planning under tight budgets. At YourNewsClub, we’ve observed the same behavioral shift in our own market research: Gen Z and millennials treat AI like an overqualified intern — “Handle this while I’m at work.”
OpenAI didn’t miss the signal. ChatGPT gained Instant Checkout, integrations with Etsy and Shopify, and deep fulfillment partnerships with Walmart and Target. Now everything – from handmade mugs to gaming bundles to toilet paper – flows through the same agent, collapsing what used to be a multi-tab labyrinth into a single conversational thread. Payment networks like PayPal and Stripe are rearchitecting their rails around agent-initiated transactions. As Maya Renn notes, whoever controls the assistant’s first recommendation controls the buyer’s entire decision path.
Behind the scenes, the mechanics look less like consumer tech and more like enterprise logistics. YourNewsClub analyst Jessica Larn, who examines how elite decisions take root in digital infrastructure, warns that “AI intermediaries are becoming a new form of power distribution. The first filtered answer isn’t just a suggestion – it’s the new top shelf of retail.” When a user asks an AI assistant, they don’t get a grid of 40 options; they get one or two highly curated answers. The stakes of that slot are enormous.
For shoppers, the shift feels deceptively gentle. The rituals remain – scrolling, screenshotting, the folder of “things my sister would like if she weren’t so picky.” What disappears is the grunt work: checking specs, catching fake markdowns, filtering identical TV models with barely distinguishable ports. A model handles the drudgery while humans handle the emotional calculus – the part an algorithm can’t learn, like knowing your mother will never touch a smart speaker.
Search is no longer the starting point – prompts are. Discovery begins inside an agent, and only afterwards do shoppers verify or click through. For retailers, the strategic battlefield is no longer the storefront but the first suggestion delivered by a chatbot. Whoever secures that position will own demand before it even reaches the website.
At Your News Club, our assessment is clear: AI is becoming the invisible layer of holiday commerce, governing how choices are framed, filtered and executed. The shift won’t eliminate human emotion – families will still argue about who deserves the nice headphones and who gets socks – but it will offload much of the logistical labor to a system that never tires, never overspends and never waits in the cold at 4 a.m.
Some shoppers will still line up before dawn. But others will stay under warm blankets, refresh a chat thread and watch their assistant surface live inventory updates, shifting prices and optimized baskets in real time. The emotional work of tradition remains analog. The optimization has become entirely synthetic. And the only open question is whether people are still steering the holiday ritual – or merely approving what the AI agent has already placed in the cart.