Amazon’s "Apple Move": The Walled Garden Strategy against AI #LTM137

Agentic Commerce is fundamentally reshaping power dynamics in digital commerce. When AI agents take over purchase intent, product selection, and decision-making, platforms risk losing influence exactly where value is created today. In this episode Ingrid talks with Amazon expert Malte Karstan about whether Amazon is losing relevance in the agentic era - or deliberately choosing a defensive strategy to buy time. At the core of the discussion is a five-step commerce model that explains why agents primarily attack discovery, ranking, and retail media, not logistics or fulfillment. The episode puts Amazon’s blocking of bots and crawling into strategic context, draws parallels to Apple’s ecosystem logic, and explores APIs as a potential new gatekeeper model. At the center remains one key question: Is defense still a strategy in the age of Agentic Commerce - or already a risk to the future of platforms?