AI agent shopping (including for travel) will be HUGE and eventually default. Shopify is showing the way forward. I expect others will follow.
Shopify has created tools that agents can use to shop with Shopify. No surprise they’re based on MCP (also MCP-UI which allows for embedded UI widgets).
This model *should* apply to travel as well – but I think works better for aggregators, like OTAs.
Aggregators for direct bookings would help the direct channel be represented in agents as well.
Even if every travel operator (hotels, etc) has an MCP server for AI agents to access, will they really want to access each hotel individually?
Not at the hotel selection phase, but maybe at the booking phase.
Still, there needs to be an INCENTIVE for travelers and their AI agents to book direct.
Otherwise nothing changes and OTAs run away with the booking market again.
Here’s what Tobias Lรผtke from Shopify had to say…
—–
“Agents will become a common way people shop. So today we are releasing 3 tools to make adding commerce to those agents trivial:
– Checkout Kit: embed commerce widgets and checkout(!) directly into your agent and chat. This is already being used by Microsoftโs @Copilot.
– Shopify Catalog: low latency global product search across millions of merchants
– Universal Cart: shop from any store, anywhere, in one cart
With these, you can build seamless embedded commerce experiences quickly, starting with all the best products by the best merchants in the world instead of having to sign them all up individually. No need to build a complex new checkout, or dealing with regulatory marketplace rules. Commerce just plugs in and feels seamless in conversations.
We believe commerce should be everywhere people are, so weโre making that as easy as possible for the AI age.
There are some really cool technical details in how this all works. We heavily invested in MCP-UI, an extension of the MCP protocol to allow exposing widgets that a host can choose to display. The product cards you see in the video are exposed through MCP-UI and then securely rendered.
This means you donโt need to fiddle with things like product variants, color swatches, subscriptions, minimums, bundles etc. The Web Components know about it all and render things correctly.
link in comments.
cc: Pablo Delgado Dรญaz-Pache Peter Marriott Sanjay Vakil Jason Cincotta Christian Watts
