It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. A shopper asks her phone for a sunscreen recommendation that won’t irritate her kid’s skin. Her AI answers, she taps once, and the bottle is on her doorstep before school pickup. No search results page, no comparison shopping, no abandoned cart.
That shopping experience is becoming less and less hypothetical. Amazon Now is delivering groceries and essentials in 30 minutes or less across dozens of U.S. cities. Twenty percent of Walmart’s store-fulfilled deliveries already arrive in under 30 minutes, from stores that cover 95% of the country. Both are deploying AI shopping assistants that surface, recommend and complete purchases in seconds. Walmart has partnered with Google to put its inventory inside Gemini.
As major retailers compress delivery times, AI shopping assistants are collapsing the discovery and decision windows. Instead of a list of 50 results in search, shoppers in AI get a shortlist of five to eight. Together, these trends are expanding the impulse category from the checkout aisle to practically everything a consumer could want. If it can arrive in 30 minutes and be surfaced by AI in seconds, it can be an impulse buy.
For Amazon and Walmart, this is an advantage. In his latest letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the company sees “higher order-completion rates when delivery promises are faster.”
But speed is really a proxy for something more durable: convenience. In an era where AI agents can surface the cheapest option for any product in seconds, competing on price alone is a losing strategy for retailers. Amazon and Walmart are building their moats by removing friction through stored payment credentials, voice ordering, one-click purchase and saved preferences. They’re making shopping with a competitor seem just that bit more difficult. And in an age where people want their stuff in minutes, that barrier might be enough.
For other retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, this is a clear threat. Unless they react smartly.
Own a Specific Problem
Here’s what I’ve spent 20 years watching: every time a major shift happens, everyone chases the new platform. Brands and retailers optimize for the new channel, sometimes squeezing their margins to do so. The danger is they wake up a few years later having surrendered their identity to an algorithm.
A brand’s Google ranking is no longer the guarantee of visibility it once was. An independent study that manually checked 1,700 businesses across 32 industries found 88% are completely absent from ChatGPT recommendations. Of those holding a page-one Google ranking, 77% still don’t appear in AI search results. A separate study found the same pattern, with over 73% of brands with page-one rankings having zero AI mentions.
In AI-intermediated commerce, brands stand out by standing for something specific. That way, the algorithm can confidently recommend them. Nobody asks an AI for “a leading provider of sleep solutions.” They ask for a mattress that won’t make them sweat. The AI rewards specificity and penalizes vagueness. Broad positioning that works on a shelf or in a TV spot registers as noise to a recommendation engine trying to give a confident answer.
Retailers and brands need to look across every digital touchpoint and ensure there is a specific problem they own for an AI to clearly recommend them. In an impulse moment the AI is doing the selling. A customer isn’t reading product descriptions, they’re receiving an AI summary that either converts them or doesn’t.
Get Inventory in the Right Place
In a 30-minute delivery marketplace location matters. A product sitting in a warehouse 40 miles from the customer might as well not exist. The AI won’t surface what can’t be delivered, and the consumer won’t wait for what can. Inventory in the wrong place is shelf space in a store nobody visits. Leading retailers like Walmart understand this, which is why it’s aiming for 65% of its stores to have automated fulfillment by the end of 2026.
Brands selling through retail partners need direct conversations about forward-positioning. Which SKUs belong in which stores, in which markets, based on real demand signals? Our data at Wayvia consistently shows the products winning on fast-delivery platforms are a focused, speed-optimized assortment, not the full catalog.
Win the Relationship Before the Next Impulse Hits
Speed and convenience create habit. The moment after a fast purchase is a moment of opportunity. A consumer who just bought from you is the most receptive they will ever be. That is the moment to establish a direct relationship: a loyalty program worth joining, a subscription that makes the next order frictionless, a channel that means next time they will come to you directly rather than asking an AI.
Repeat customers convert at dramatically higher rates and are far less price sensitive than first-time buyers. In a world where the AI picks the brand for the first purchase, the brand has to earn the second one. That starts the moment the first order lands.
The Opportunity in the Disruption
Retailers like Amazon have enough weight to shift the center of gravity for the industry. Just look at how Amazon’s decision to pull Prime Day into June moved the sales event for everyone else. As 30-minute delivery becomes more common on some platforms, it will expand consumers’ expectations for rapid delivery across the board. With AI shortening the period of discovery and decision, there is less time than ever to secure a sale.
The brands that thrive will be those that learn to operate inside the new reality. They will focus relentlessly on discoverability in AI and be disciplined in fulfillment to turn first impulse purchasers into repeat customers.
Anthony Ferry is CEO of Wayvia, an ecommerce analytics platform used by 2,000+ brands across all major retailers. He has spent 20+ years helping brands navigate every major shift in commerce.
