British-founded retailer JD Sports Fashion will let U.S. customers search for and purchase sports footwear, apparel and accessories directly inside AI platforms, including Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, without leaving those apps.

The rollout will start with Copilot and extend to other large language model platforms as purchasing features expand.

Stack and platform mechanics

The retailer is using its existing commercetools commerce stack and Stripe payments to connect AI-led product discovery to secure checkout and payments. JD claimed it is the first retailer to use commercetools and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite (ACS) for this kind of integration.

For U.S. commerce leaders, the significance is less about a new payment button and more about where conversion happens. Microsoft has been positioning Copilot Checkout as a way to complete purchases inside Copilot “without being redirected,” while keeping the merchant as the merchant of record, a structure that preserves familiar tax, fraud, and chargeback responsibilities for retailers.

Stripe, for its part, has positioned ACS as a single integration that makes products discoverable to AI agents, simplifies checkout, and supports “agentic payments.”

Why the U.S. matters

JD is making the U.S. the launch market for a reason. The company said North America is its largest market, representing about 40% of global sales, supported by more than 2,500 stores across JD, DTLR, Shoe Palace and Hibbett. In that context, getting in front of shoppers inside AI assistants is a new distribution channel, one that could sit alongside paid search, marketplaces, and social commerce.

The move also lines up with how AI platforms are wiring commerce into their products. Google announced a major expansion to enable shopping within Gemini through partnerships with retailers including Walmart, Shopify and Wayfair, with “instant checkout” designed to keep users inside the chatbot.

OpenAI has separately been building shopping experiences in ChatGPT, including “shopping research” to help users choose products, and it has described an “Instant Checkout” architecture tied to an open standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Commercetools has also said it joined Stripe and OpenAI as a launch partner for that protocol, positioning it as a common way for agents to connect to commerce systems.

Search shifts and what’s next

JD’s own statement points to a consumer shift, citing research it said was conducted by Adobe Express in 2025 and pointing to Pew Research Center findings that AI is affecting traditional search behavior.

Pew’s published work on Google’s AI search summaries has found that AI-generated overviews change how people interact with results and can reduce clicks to external sites, an important backdrop for retailers that have historically relied on search traffic to drive conversion.

Adobe has also reported meaningful adoption of genAI in shopping journeys in surveys of U.S. consumers, especially for research and recommendations.

JD’s rollout positions AI assistants as a new discovery-and-checkout surface at the same time that Gartner predicts traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 as search marketing loses share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.

In its announcement, JD said it will “invest in the optimisation of how its content is found and displayed within AI platforms,” and that the commercetools/Stripe integration will optimize JD’s product information, pricing and inventory systems so AI platforms can return accurate, real-time availability and complete purchases through secure checkout and payment processing.

JD executives said they plan to demo the ACS integration at NRF in New York alongside Stripe and commercetools, while JD continues its broader commercetools rollout to the U.K. and Europe in 2026, suggesting the company is preparing to expand the same model as AI platform purchasing rolls out beyond the U.S.