Agentic has been the buzzword for a while now, and for good reason. It has the potential to revolutionise how we approach many tasks, especially research, discovery, and planning. But the most interesting shift is how it will fundamentally affect commerce and shopping. There’s already a term for it: Agentic Commerce.
Digging into this topic and reading the material available online leads to an interesting path of discovery, and the potential disruption it can have on how customers shop online (and even in-store). The question for every business leader is how to prepare and ensure you benefit from this shift, rather than being eliminated by it, as some will be.
Although the term is trending, many businesses are still seemingly unfazed, or at least not very worried. Why? Because the volume of sales and transactional searches still happens on traditional search engines like Google. To give context, Google processes an estimated 8.5 billion searches per day (4), while even the most popular AI platforms like ChatGPT have around 542 million monthly active users (5).
This disparity makes it easy to think that shifting focus here, or even doing nothing, won’t impact the business much. However, as we’ll discuss, completely ignoring this shift and not jumping on the bandwagon is a bad decision, it’s a slow-moving tsunami, not a sudden downpour.
In simple terms, and in its most advanced state, agentic commerce refers to autonomous AI agents doing everything for you, the consumer.
This means the agent handles the entire shopping journey: from discovering the product to placing the order, and even making and authenticating the payment. Say goodbye to searching on Google Shopping, doing endless research, comparing merchants and prices, and going down the typical marketing funnel, the agent does all that for you.
And it’s not limited to the whole process being initiated by a prompt. Full-on agentic commerce can also:
• Anticipate Needs: Make purchases based on your habits, personal data, and life events (like expecting a baby or needing a restock).
• Achieve Full Autonomy: Execute complex, multi-step transactions without human intervention.
This is agentic commerce in its predicted “most advanced” form, which is likely years away. Many things still need to happen for full autonomy to be possible: LLMs need to get smarter, technology needs to mature, merchants need to prep their systems, and payment gateways need to be robust enough to safely handle user payments (6). Basically, full system architectures need to mature to allow this to be possible.
But this doesn’t mean agentic commerce is a future-only concept. It is happening now, just in its earlier stages. And even this early stage stands to impact your ecommerce business in a major way.
We are already seeing examples of this shift:
Like any maturing technology, agentic commerce will be an evolution realised in distinct phases. Understanding where we are now and where we are going is critical for planning.
| Phase | Current State | Description | Impact on Merchants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: Agent-to-Website | (We are here) | An AI agent interacts with your website (or its data feeds) to gather information, returns a recommendation to the user, and the user makes the final decision and transaction within the chat portal (e.g., Perplexity, ChatGPT). | High: Loss of website traffic, loss of direct customer engagement, transaction happens off-site. |
| Phase 2: Agent-to-Agent | (The ultimate goal) | A consumer’s agent (e.g., ChatGPT) interacts with a merchant’s agent (e.g., a dedicated brand bot) to place an order, perform a refund, or negotiate terms, achieving full autonomy. | Extreme: Near-zero human involvement in the transaction loop. Requires robust, proprietary agent infrastructure. |
The current phase is already a big shift in how customers discover products, and the shift to the next, more autonomous phase is likely to be even faster due to rapid tech advancements, easier integrations, and the connected age.
We’re already seeing online shopping big players like Google, Amazon, PayPal, and Mastercard making moves to ensure they are ready for the final revolution and, more importantly, to help shape it. Business leaders who want to ensure they aren’t left behind or eliminated when larger percentages of shoppers start using agentic commerce also need to start making moves now.
This shift is likely to be a big one, and there will be winners and big losers, just like with any revolution, the paid ads revolution showed us this. In the case of agentic commerce, the big winners will highly likely be early adopters.
Winning in agentic commerce will require a full shift in how companies operate, impacting systems that might take years to build, perfect, and stabilise.
Agentic commerce, even in its simple form, will impact your business in ways that are both disruptive and beneficial.
The most disruptive impact is that the customer will be able to transact or perform the desired action directly from the AI chat, meaning they don’t have to visit your website to do anything.
This has several negative consequences for traditional ecommerce models:
So many of the benefits of the customer going through your proprietary funnel are negatively impacted. This is just a simple example of the impact this shift can have on traditional websites, not to mention effects on loyalty, customer retention, and returning user KPIs.
However, it will not be all doom and gloom. Many of these revenue models will likely be replaced by new, agentic-specific ones. Agentic commerce will come with losses and gains, and business models will need to be revised.
The goal is to ensure that the potential losses, which come with the customer only interacting with merchants at the lowest parts of the funnel, or not at all, are negated by the benefits that come with agentic commerce. Businesses will need to discover opportunities, innovate, and seize every relevant chance that arises.
Perhaps the most important question is how you prepare and ensure you’re an early adopter who is not left behind. The good news is that you should already have a pretty good idea of whether you’re ready for this revolution or not.
Agentic commerce will not be a “big bang” but will happen in phases. The current big thing is ensuring your products and information appear as a trusted source in AI chatbot platforms or Google’s AI Overviews.
The question becomes: Is your data and information optimised enough for your products to appear in these prompts? In other words, is your data AI-ready?
This is the AI version of SEO, often termed AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). The terms are still inconsistent, but the concept is clear: AI knows about you based on the information it can access on the internet.
One of the most important things in the age of agentic commerce will be your infrastructure. You need to invest in the right foundation early on so you’re not blocked when you need to move fast.
Agentic commerce will require a lot of autonomous communication between different systems, both internal and external. Therefore, your tech stack should be structured around this. APIs and proprietary agents should be the core of your system.
Choose your third-party SPs wisely, as they can become bottlenecks as agentic commerce matures and takes on a full stack.
Critical touchpoints like payment gateways, delivery systems, and post-purchase services will put the brakes on your agentic commerce strategy if your SPs lack the required functionality, security, or legal framework. It’s important to note that things such as payment readiness are not only a block for you but for agentic commerce as a whole, as the speed of development largely impacts the adoption of agentic commerce.
As a new model, there is still a lot that will become clear as time goes on, so it’s important to stay in the know and update your strategy. For example, in the age of agentic commerce, what does AI care about the most to recommend your product? Is it the price, reviews, product information, over overall trust and loyalty to brands like human shoppers do? The answers to these questions will define the new optimisation playbook.
This is an introductory view of the next revolution of commerce. It’s no longer an idea or a “maybe” – it’s something that is happening right now, right in front of our eyes.
We have an opportunity to be part of the next big shift in how we shop. If we move forward strategically and carefully, we can ensure that we don’t only benefit from it, but we shape it as well.
To the customer, agentic commerce represents an opportunity to save time and automate a part of their life that was largely time-consuming and filled with decision paralysis.
To the merchant, it represents a pivotal point that is either make it or break it. It potentially undoes, or at least decreases the benefit from, years of optimisations to rank higher on SERPs. It redefines the funnels as we know them or completely disintegrates them.
Agentic commerce is here to stay. It is projected that agentic commerce could generate as much as $1 trillion in orchestrated U.S. retail revenue by 2030 (2). Merchants who do not adopt will likely perish. Just as shopping through search impacted your whole tech stack and played a role in choosing the platforms you work with, it will be the same with agentic commerce. The only difference is that you will have to accommodate two kinds of shoppers: the traditional SERP user and the new agentic consumer.
In the next part of this series, we will discuss the technical side of agentic commerce, which will likely be the critical part that, if not done right, will make or paralyse merchants. Subscribe below to be notified when this episode goes live and other interesting insights in Ecommerce, CRO, Project management and marketplace.
To ensure your business is positioned to win in the age of agentic commerce, get a free audit of your catalogue, AI brand image, and CRO foundations. Contact me to assess how ready you truly are.
1. How Agentic AI is Transforming Commerce and Payment – Deloitte
2. The agentic commerce opportunity: How AI agents are ushering in a new era for consumers and merchants – McKinsey & Company
3. Perplexity Selects PayPal to Power Agentic Commerce – PayPal Newsroom
4. How Many Google Searches Are There Per Day? – Exploding Topics
5. Google vs ChatGPT Market Share: 2025 Report – First Page Sage
6. What is Agentic Commerce? Understanding Benefits & Risks – Human Security
7. All In On Agents – Walmart Global Tech