thought leadership

Is Agentic Shopping a 'Collective Hallucination'? What the IAB Debate Gets Right and Wrong

At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit on April 15, analyst Andrew Lipsman dropped a line that lit up the industry: "It is a collective hallucination that people will shop this way." He was talking about agentic shopping, the idea that AI agents will handle product discovery, comparison, and purchasing on behalf of consumers. He's not entirely wrong. But he's not entirely right either. TL;DR: The IAB debate exposed a real tension: skeptics are correct that consumers won't complete purchases