Agentic shopping stopped being a buzzword in 2025 and started showing up in real conversion data. In this Shero Live, Beth Shero, CEO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, closes out the year with Quentin Montalto, COO of ShipperHQ, and Jonathan Rodgers, VP of Partnerships, North America at Patchworks, to break down three lessons brands need going into 2026.
If you're trying to separate what's real about AI shopping from what's still hype, this conversation is for you.
In this episode
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Why AI-assisted shopping drove a 46% lift in conversion rate over Black Friday and Cyber Monday
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Why "garbage in, garbage out" data problems will actively cause AI agents to make bad recommendations
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Why free shipping selection jumped from 45% to 58% of orders year over year, and what that signals for agentic checkout
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Why product pages, not homepages, are becoming the new front door for AI-driven discovery
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What compliance and shipping restrictions (hazardous goods, restricted items) mean once LLMs sit between the customer and checkout
Watch the video for an in-depth dive
Episode highlights
Beth Shero opens by grounding the conversation in data rather than hype. ShipperHQ's own numbers show AI-assisted shopping driving a 46% increase in conversion rate over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and Beth reframes the scale in dollar terms: a channel that used to send a brand $10,000 in revenue from search could now send upward of $400,000 in revenue through AI-driven discovery. She notes Shero is already seeing measurable referral traffic from ChatGPT across client sites, something that barely existed a year ago.
Jonathan Rodgers brings the first lesson: stability starts with clean, connected data. Patchworks unifies ecommerce, ERP, PIM, and warehouse systems so that inventory, pricing, and order data stay consistent across every channel feeding an AI agent. His point is blunt: no matter how capable the AI is, inconsistent or siloed data will cause it to make poor recommendations, and that breaks customer trust before an order is even placed. He points to Patchworks' founding role in the Commerce Operations Foundation, a new industry standard for MCP server interoperability, as evidence that agent-ready infrastructure is becoming a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
Quentin Montalto's lesson centers on transparency, particularly around shipping. He describes the shift from emotionally driven storefront browsing to a more transactional, factual mode of shopping once an agent is involved, where delivery date, cost, and stock status matter more than branding or design. ShipperHQ's Black Friday and Cyber Monday data backs this up: free shipping selection rose from 45% to 58% of orders year over year, while use of "other" fulfillment options like store pickup also grew, suggesting shoppers are optimizing for value and flexibility over speed. Quentin argues that as product pages become the new entry point for AI-driven discovery, shipping data needs to live directly on that page, not buried at checkout.
The conversation closes on reliability at scale, touching on compliance risk for regulated categories like hazardous materials and restricted goods, where incorrect shipping data in an agentic flow could create real legal exposure. All three guests land on the same closing advice: prioritize proven infrastructure and clean data over hype, and test how easily your own brand can be found through an AI agent today.