When people talk about agentic commerce, the conversation almost always centers on the United States, or at most Buenos Aires. Rosario and Funes rarely come up. But most of the online shopping done in this region passes through Mercado Libre at some point, or competes directly against Amazon -and both are betting seriously on an AI agent completing the purchase for you. What those two platforms do over the next few years isn't a distant curiosity: it's literally the ground any local business here will be competing on.
What's already happening, not what's coming
On May 13, 2026, Amazon renamed Rufus -its AI shopping assistant- to "Alexa for Shopping" and added something more concrete than a chat that answers questions: the "Buy for Me" button, which purchases an item on your behalf, even on sites outside Amazon. It launched covering 65,000 products; today it covers over half a million. Before that rebrand, Rufus had already helped more than 300 million customers research, compare, and buy throughout 2025.
Mercado Libre is moving down the same road, with an even more direct pitch: its own CFO stated that "across our entire ecosystem, we're seeing clear evidence that our investments in artificial intelligence are accelerating revenue," backed by partnerships with OpenAI, AWS, and Google Cloud. The company describes its approach as two layers -an "invisible AI" that already quietly optimizes content for thousands of sellers to sell more, and a "visible AI" on the buyer's side- and reports have surfaced of an assistant under development, codenamed "MAGO," meant to go beyond recommending products and get directly involved in how people pay. It isn't official yet, but the direction is clear.
These two platforms aren't a distant case study for businesses in Rosario and Funes: they are, today, the storefront where any local business that sells online competes, whether or not it has its own store.
Why this isn't someone else's city's problem
This is where it's worth bringing things down to something concrete and distinctly unglamorous: the abandoned cart. In Argentina, eight out of ten shopping carts get abandoned before checkout is completed -above the global average, which sits around 70%- and on mobile devices the number climbs even higher, past 85%. It's the quietest loss any online store has: someone made it all the way to the end, picked a product, and left anyway.
That problem already has a simpler, more accessible version of exactly what Amazon and Mercado Libre are building at global scale: a system that detects someone left a cart halfway through and picks the conversation back up on its own, without waiting for someone on the sales team to notice and type a message by hand. You don't need to be Amazon to have that piece running -you need to have it built, which is a different thing.
With Grupo Previnca San Lorenzo we already built a WhatsApp AI agent that handles inquiries and manages conversations end to end, without a person needing to be present for every message. That same architecture -not a new promise, but one already running in production- is what a business in Rosario or Funes needs to recover abandoned carts over WhatsApp instead of quietly losing them: the agent writes at the right moment, resolves whatever stopped the purchase -a shipping cost, a sizing question, a delayed confirmation- and closes the sale without anyone needing to stare at an abandonment dashboard at 11pm.
What we think comes next
This is, on purpose, the point where we stop reporting confirmed facts and start saying what we think, as a team that builds this every day. With Amazon pushing "Buy for Me" outside its own marketplace and Mercado Libre openly talking about accelerating revenue with AI and an assistant that gets involved in payment, the direction looks fairly clear to us for the next two or three years:
Checkout is going to stop being a screen. It's increasingly going to happen through a conversation -WhatsApp, a voice assistant, a chat- that starts before anyone even opens an app. Amazon is already testing this outside its own site; there's no technical reason for it to stay contained there.
Automatic reorder is going to stop being a niche feature. A business that sells something recurring -supplies, seasonal apparel, regularly consumed products- will be able to let an agent reorder on its own, without the person needing to come back and buy the same thing again.
Businesses that depend solely on the marketplace are going to end up more exposed, not less. The smarter Mercado Libre's shopping agent gets, the more it decides on your behalf using data that belongs to the marketplace, not to you. A business with no direct channel of its own -its own store, its own agent, its own contact base- ends up competing on price inside a storefront it doesn't control.
Why Rosario and Funes don't have to wait for this to "arrive"
The easy read is to wait for Amazon or Mercado Libre to finish building this and trust that it eventually trickles down to local businesses too. The read we think is right is the opposite one: those platforms are optimizing their own marketplace, not your brand or your direct relationship with your customers. A business in Rosario or Funes that already built its own channel -its own store, its own contact base, its own AI agent- doesn't depend on a product decision made in Seattle or Buenos Aires working in its favor.
We've already done this with businesses in the region: with Sonder and Neumáticos Verona we built e-commerce with measurable results, and with Previnca we already built the automated-conversation piece needed so an abandoned cart doesn't become a lost sale. Putting those two pieces together -a well-built store of your own plus an agent that talks and closes the sale- is, plainly, the version a local business can have running this year, not in the hypothetical future where Amazon or Mercado Libre decide to bring this to every corner of Argentina.
As we've said in our earlier notes on this -what your catalog needs for an AI agent to recommend you and where the regulation behind all of this actually stands- the foundation doesn't change: clean up the catalog, own your channel, and build the agent that handles that conversation. If your business in Rosario, Funes, or anywhere else in Argentina is losing sales at checkout or depends solely on the marketplace, tell us about it. We work on e-commerce through our B2B and wholesale e-commerce solution and WhatsApp AI agents through our WhatsApp AI agent solution.
