Oct 28, 2025 - Axios Events
Axios Live: AI agents spark debate over the future of shopping
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Attendees gathered around the table during dinner.
LAS VEGAS – Artificial intelligence and finance experts offered differing views on whether agentic tools will replace human decision-making in commerce at an Axios Live event this week.
- Axios' Dan Primack and Lucinda Shen moderated the Oct. 26 roundtable discussion, sponsored by Synchrony.
Why it matters: AI agents are evolving to make purchases on behalf of consumers, and this opens up the potential to reshape how people discover products, shop and spend.
5 big things: Here's what the attendees had to say …
- AI agents can be liberating for consumers in helping with decision-making, but there are items that people want to do all the shopping for themselves, Mostly AI's chief AI and democratization officer Alexandra Ebert said. "I think agents will … give us the freedom to say … what is all of the stuff that we can outsource."
- There is a greater opportunity for agentic AI to take off in B2B commerce than consumer spending, Astrada CEO Salman Syed said. "I think when it comes to agentic, yeah, people want their time back, but I don't know if people are looking to spend even more money."
- Agentic AI is changing the game for product discovery more than the financial aspects of e-commerce, Early Warning Services market development executive Hans Reisgies said. "As a browser, I would be worried, as search, I would be worried, because the old model of discovery … is going to change. But the money movement stays the same."
- Trust is the key underpinning of e-commerce and payment systems, especially in the agentic AI era, Agingo co-founder and CTO Kyriakos Skiouris said. "You need a trust layer."
- Consumers will eventually have a fully consumer-aligned AI agent — an entirely new dynamic, Prism Data founder and CEO Jason Rosen predicted. "Will they be sophisticated enough to find the right one that has their interests at heart? I don't know … but whether they have access to it? I think the answer is going to be yes."
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Synchrony SVP of innovation, payments and AI Mike Storiale said he believes AI agents will eventually make more purchasing decisions because of how much consumers value their time.
- "I think the reason I believe it is that nobody can buy more time, and everyone is trying to buy time back," Storiale said. "And so that idea of an agent-to-agent, where I'm going to get a half hour back in my day, five minutes back in my day, might be worth it."
