Throughout history, we’ve witnessed breakthroughs that didn’t just improve things—they’ve also completely reshaped human experiences. In commerce, similar paradigm shifts have repeatedly altered how people shop and how businesses operate: the first cash register changed bookkeeping; the introduction of the barcode completely changed global logistics; and the arrival of the internet changed our reliance on physical stores. Today, the world of retail and payments stands on the verge of another such monumental moment: agentic commerce.
Agentic commerce is a fundamental shift that will reshape how consumers discover, search, and purchase products. In the coming years, shoppers will embrace AI agents that discover products, compare options, negotiate prices, and complete purchases to give them exactly what they want, at prices that work for them.
Unlike predictive AI (which helps us forecast), or generative AI (which helps us create), agentic AI takes the crucial step of taking action on a person or company’s behalf. It goes beyond traditional e-commerce to a truly assistive experience — whether on a consumer’s own device or through a retailer’s site — that feels like a personal shopper for every consumer. By next year, we anticipate a significant rise in consumers interacting with AI agents to manage their shopping, from initial intent to final receipt.
For merchants, the agentic era introduces two new interaction models for connecting with customers. First, merchants can own the consumer experience from product discovery to checkout. This model requires creating a branded, conversational agent that can interact with a shopper’s AI agent. For example, a consumer could instruct their agent: “I’m going to the Canadian Rockies in August and am not sure what to wear. Can you recommend a couple of outfits in my style?” The merchant’s agent could communicate with the shopper’s AI agent to access permissioned shopping data to provide more relevant recommendations based on the consumer’s style and budget preferences.
The second model involves operating as a fluid ecosystem player, prioritizing the sale no matter where it originates — from a consumer’s agent, another merchant’s platform, or from something different altogether, like a social app. Imagine a consumer asks the merchant’s agent to purchase a product that is not in its catalog or is currently out of stock. Instead of losing the sale, the agent could interact with other retailers’ agents to source the item, complete the transaction, and fulfill the order — creating a frictionless and endless shopping experience that puts the shopper’s needs first.
For payments providers, agentic commerce is a fundamental shift in the transaction process. It replaces the standard checkout experience with a direct, automated connection between personal AI agents and merchant AI agents. These smart agents can handle everything from price tracking to fraud detection, making transactions faster and inherently more secure. However, having a human in the loop will be important to ensure that critical, high-value transactions initiated by autonomous agents on behalf of a person are reviewed and verified by that person.
To enable these new interaction models, interoperability is crucial, and the industry is championing protocols like the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open, payment-agnostic framework for secure, trusted, and seamless agent-led transactions that already has partners like Mastercard and PayPal on board. With AP2, both consumers and merchants can unlock new ways of interacting with each other. For example, a user could instruct their AI agent to book a round-trip flight and a hotel for a specific weekend with a total budget of $1,500, and then the agent can find a combination that fits and securely book both simultaneously.
The shift to agentic commerce is happening now. To take advantage, I believe there are four core areas where executives must focus:
- Provide clear product data: AI agents rely on context and precision. To ensure your products are highly recommended by these multimodal tools, marketers must treat product information as a strategic asset. This means ensuring product information is reliable and well-organized so agents easily understand, categorize and match your product to specific consumer intent.
- Establish solid tech foundations: You can’t build a skyscraper on a swamp. That’s why businesses must prioritize a strong data platform to prepare for this architectural shift. AI agents are only as good as the data they run on. Building clean, connected back-end systems (data, tools, and protocols) that allow AI assistants to interact and complete transactions without manual intervention is critical.
- Maintain human oversight: As mentioned before, keep human judgment involved in critical AI-driven decisions. This “human-in-the-loop” approach is essential for building consumer trust and managing risks as AI capabilities grow.
- Leverage the ecosystem: Because we are still in the early stages, there are many unsolved problems in the way of agentic commerce gaining traction. When creating an agentic commerce initiative, it’s critical to lean on software and consulting partners who are on the front lines and have learned what works and what doesn’t in this new era.
There’s no doubt the future of commerce will be agentic. The time to build the foundation for this industry shift is now. As AI becomes more sophisticated, commerce will move far beyond transactions to anticipating and managing our needs autonomously. Business leaders who act decisively today won’t just keep pace; they will help engineer the future.
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