The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that Shopify has partnered with Google and Microsoft to help shoppers find and buy its merchants' products more easily through artificial-intelligence chatbots, and is launching a new customer plan to open these AI sales to other brands. The Globe's Irene Galea writes that this is the latest in a slew of announcements by e-commerce companies embracing agentic AI. Shopify joins the likes of Walmart and Wayfair in signing such deals with Google. On Sunday at the National Retail Federation conference in New York, Shopify said it would soon allow merchants to sell directly through Google's Gemini app and its AI Mode in Google Search. And just days prior, Microsoft announced that it was pushing shopping and checkout through to its own chatbot app, Microsoft Copilot, with an integration for Shopify. Agentic AI allows shoppers to search for products on-line through AI chatbots and then buy items without leaving the conversation. Shopify, which hosts on-line stores for merchants and takes a cut of those stores' sales, announced its first partnership of this kind with ChatGPT in September. Analysts have said agentic AI has the potential to reshape the future of on-line shopping.