AI Assistants as Retail Gatekeepers

Large retailers are embedding themselves inside conversational AI (Walmart + Google Gemini) so assistants can recommend and complete purchases directly. That turns assistants into a new, intermediary point of sale and discovery, shifting merchant economics and forcing retailers to secure placement inside AI stacks to avoid being bypassed. — If assistants become default commerce UIs, platform governance, antitrust, data‑ownership, and consumer‑privacy policy will need to adapt because the retail funnel moves from webpages to chat, concentrating market power in a few AI providers.