From Hard Mode to Shopping in God Mode
Andreessen Horowitz wrote the essay on where AI takes online shopping. This is the part they left open: who god mode belongs to.
The essay worth reading twice
Last year Andreessen Horowitz published Shopping in God Mode with AI, and it remains the clearest picture anyone has drawn of where online retail is heading. God mode is their phrase for the end state: shopping without the work. No hunting, no guessing, no comparing across a dozen tabs, because the store already understands who the shopper is and what they came for.
Buried in the essay is the idea that matters most: the personal data flywheel. Every interaction teaches the system a little more about the shopper. Every answer improves on the last. The value compounds, quietly, for whoever owns it.
And who owns it is what this article is about.
Hard mode: where storefronts actually are
Set the vision against the reality of most retail websites today and the gap is uncomfortable. AI has poured into retail for three years, but it went to the back office: demand forecasting, supply chains, pricing, ad copy, product descriptions, support tickets. Useful work, well funded, much discussed.
The moment revenue happens got almost none of it. That moment is a person on a storefront with money and intent, trying to find something. What do they get? A keyword search box with no intelligence behind it, page after page of product listings, a wall of filters, and a decent chance of giving up. We call it hard mode, and it is how most online shopping still works in 2026. The back office has been transformed. The shopping has not.
Look at the market map
The a16z essay includes a market map of AI shopping companies, and it repays close attention. Most of the map is consumer territory: try-on apps, digital wardrobes, deal hunters, resale search. Tools a shopper downloads or visits. And in the discovery and search category, the part of the map closest to the moment revenue happens, every single company named is a consumer destination. Not one of them lives on the retailer's website.
That is the uncomfortable read for brands. These products are built for the shopper, and the shopper is their user. The merchant is not their customer and is not in the relationship at all. So when shopping happens inside them, the flywheel builds up inside them. That is not a criticism of those companies; it is simply their architecture. The retailer still gets today's order. The compounding understanding of their own customers accrues somewhere else.
To be plain about it, Morvo is a third party too. Retailers have always bought their technology. The question that separates the tools is not who built them, but where the shopping happens and who ends up owning the flywheel.
God mode for the retailer
Morvo is our answer to that question. God mode, on the retailer's own storefront, with the flywheel handed to the brand.
A shopper types into the store what they would say to a person: a birthday present for a seven year old obsessed with dinosaurs, a gift for a dad who has everything, something gentle enough for sensitive skin. Morvo handles it in one conversation. It understands the request properly, brings together the products the merchant's team merchandised to go together, respects budget and requirements, and builds a fuller basket instead of losing the customer after one failed search. That is why we guarantee an increase in conversion, average order value and basket size, alongside a genuinely better experience for the customer.
Underneath sits engineering built for the storefront rather than the back office, which is why so little of it exists elsewhere. Our retail layers keep every answer tied to the live catalogue, today's stock and today's prices, so a recommendation never points at something that sold out yesterday.
And on top sits the flywheel, built to point at the brand rather than at us. Every conversation shows the store how real people ask for things. Nobody speaks in category-menu language; they describe a person, a problem, an occasion. The store's discovery gets designed around that language and sharpens month by month. All of it stays with the merchant: their shoppers, their conversations, their compounding asset.
Who god mode belongs to
a16z asked what shopping looks like when it reaches god mode. Our answer is that it should look like the retailer's own store, finally working: hard mode switched off for the customer, and the flywheel owned by the brand.
Retailers are choosing where their flywheel will live right now, mostly without realising the choice is being made. If you want to see god mode running on your own catalogue, the preview takes minutes.
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