Traffic from personal AI shopping assistants has more than tripled across Forter's network in a month, following the arrival of tools including Muse and Instinct, the commerce platform said.

Retailers are now dealing with a sharp rise in transactions initiated by so-called agentic assistants as they approach the holiday shopping period. Forter tracks payments, identity and fraud prevention across a network linking more than 2 billion shoppers with nearly 1 million businesses, covering half a trillion dollars in annual retail transactions.

Its data showed agentic order volumes rising steadily through late summer. From August to September, orders increased 24% month on month, or 48% including Instinct and Grok Bot after Forter detected their first orders at the start of the month.

Muse, launched later in the month, had a bigger immediate effect. Forter began detecting Muse orders on September 21, and agentic orders rose 229% month on month that week. Although that initial lead later eased, Muse still accounted for 46% of agentic orders in the final week of the month.

The shift adds a new layer of complexity for online retailers. Unlike a conventional large language model that responds to prompts with text, these assistants can store logins, two-factor authentication details and card information, then carry out parts of the buying process on a shopper's behalf through services such as WhatsApp or iMessage.

That means merchants may face both a higher volume of automated shopping activity and new questions over whether those agents should be treated as trusted buyers at checkout.

Source link