Canadian Portfolio Managers‘ Monthly: North American Equity Thematic Research

Research evidence excerpt

Canadian Portfolio Managers‘ Monthly: North American Equity Thematic Research

AI platforms remain <1% of total web traffic

across key e-commerce marketplaces & retailers, though agentic traffic is driving

greater engagement, conversion, & order rates at higher margins for merchants/

platforms. We believe shoppers on AI platforms have higher intent vs. other traffic

sources, even though the platforms overall are lower commercial intent in

nature. On-platform remains key to driving Buyer acquisition, frequency, and

retention. E-commerce platforms are utilizing AI/ML to improve search ranking &

recommendation models, drive greater personalization & product discovery, and

deepen engagement. Agentic infrastructure & merchant solutions remain key to

scaling agentic commerce, reducing friction across the merchant and transaction

flow, & handling complexities across data, catalog ingestion, payments, and broader

technical infrastructure.

• Infrastructure Advancements Integral to Driving Agentic Commerce. Various e-

commerce industry participants are collaborating to define an open standard of

Internet infrastructure supporting AI-driven transactions. Google, Shopify, & others

have co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), providing an open-

source protocol for AI agents to interact and connect merchants, buyers, & payment

providers. Google’s Universal Cart enables consumers to add items to their cart

across multiple merchants and across services, and it leverages intelligent reasoning

to provide personalized shopping assistance. The UCP enables seamless checkout

from the Universal Cart, including for select SHOP merchants. We believe the UCP

provides the most compelling breadth of offerings toward becoming the industry

standard for AI shopping.