{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.text}}
{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.text}}
We live in an era of intense, digitally driven decision-making. Planning a long weekend getaway? You’ll probably spend hours toggling between sites to book airfare, find the right hotel and buy travel-size essentials. Getting your family ready for back-to-school season? More of the same — shopping for backpacks and sneakers. Retailers have spent years optimizing their online presence to meet people at these very human moments of intent, discovery and purchasing. But with the explosion of AI, a reset is already in motion — and agentic commerce is at the forefront.
What is agentic commerce? It’s a new way of shopping powered by AI agents: software systems, usually powered by GenAI, designed to act on a user’s behalf. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI agents don’t just respond to prompts. They can browse, compare and even initiate purchases based on the user’s goals, preferences and constraints. Like AI agents are changing the future of work, consumer-facing AI agents could change the future of shopping.
Think of AI agents like virtual personal shoppers — not just responding to prompts but anticipating needs, evaluating options and, increasingly, taking action on behalf of users. In just six months, retailers already saw a 1,200% surge in traffic originating from GenAI, according to Adobe — and that’s only the beginning.
As the consumer journey morphs into something more dynamic, efficient and personalized, agentic commerce could reshape the traditional retail funnel, from search to sale. It’s not too late to assess how AI agents may reshape your company’s relationships with consumers, and adapt your go-to-market strategies accordingly.
Discovery and decision-making can now happen before, and even instead of, a visit to your website.
A new consumer starting point
AI is already reshaping how people start their shopping journeys: surfacing outfit ideas, evaluating options and generating recommendations before users ever visit a retail site. The shift is already visible. More than half of high-income millennials and a quarter of baby boomers have used or plan to use AI to shop online.
To stay relevant, brands must show up where discovery begins — on AI platforms. Just as SEO helped brands gain visibility on search engines, generative engine optimization, or GEO, is becoming essential. Structuring and tagging content is only part of the equation. If AI models can’t access your brand’s data, your company’s products may not appear at all, hurting the brand’s visibility — and its sales.
It took 16 months for smartphones to reach 100 million users. ChatGPT did it in two months and today sees more than that number on any given day. The implications are clear. Discovery and decision-making can now happen before, and even instead of, a visit to your website.
The next stage: AI-initiated buying
Today, tools that use GenAI can already guide users to products, but purchases are still completed manually. That’s about to change. AI platforms are developing in-app purchasing features, including autofill checkouts and direct API-based transactions. Referral fees, paid product placements and branded shopping integrations may follow.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Eventually, AI assistants may initiate purchases without being prompted, anticipating your needs based on your calendar, habits and preferences. If your AI assistant knows about your upcoming hiking trip, you might forget bug spray, but the AI assistant won’t. It will remind you and ask you if you’d like to purchase some. Over time, even that approval step could vanish for everyday staples like batteries or paper towels, if you decided to bypass or delegate it.
With mathematical efficiency, an AI agent could act on the parameters you set. For example, if you asked it to, it could make price the primary user goal and, in that case, the $98 product listing would beat the $100 option every time. And down the line, a personalized AI bot may even start a sort of bidding war before it buys, negotiating with retailers’ AI tools to find the best price. Ultimately, agentic commerce isn't just a new channel. It’s a restructuring of the retail funnel itself.
This moment calls for decisive action — before AI agents start making the decisions without you.
A new strategic imperative for retailers
As AI takes on a growing role in product discovery, evaluation and even purchasing, retailers must rethink core elements of their strategy — from brand equity and pricing to digital visibility. Businesses that primarily rely on website traffic or in-store experiences to help drive loyalty may find those channels losing ground in an AI-driven funnel.
But where there’s risk, there’s also opportunity. Retailers can differentiate not just with branding, but with AI-ready content, smart merchandising, exclusive SKUs and seamless AI integration. They can also explore building their own AI tools, so that they own the experience and can direct users accordingly rather than solely fitting into the playbook of the largest LLMs.
This moment calls for a responsible approach to rewire and retool the retail business model, with a lens toward how quickly AI is evolving. Here’s a quick framework for getting started.
- Optimize for discovery. Make your content machine readable and easily crawlable by LLMs. Apply GEO principles to ensure you have structured data, clean tagging and multimodal content related to your brand and products.
- Prepare for transactions. Design shopping experiences that align with how AI tools may enable in-app purchasing. Build flexible APIs for checkout and integrations. Evaluate your unit economics and revisit pricing models with a scenario lens. What if price-first bots become your biggest buyers?
- Rewire for agentic commerce. Integrate AI into core functions like merchandising and supply chain. Equip your teams and systems to work in tandem with AI agents, not around them.
The retail future is agentic
For most executives, AI is already a top priority. Nearly 9 in 10 senior executives expect their team or business function plans to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months, according to PwC’s AI Agent Survey. But awareness doesn’t always translate to transformative action.
Many organizations are experimenting with AI at the margins, but few retailers are taking steps to truly reimagine their business around the future of agentic commerce. That’s the opportunity on the table — to stop thinking about AI in abstract terms and to begin enacting a strategy fit for the next wave of consumer behavior. It’s already here.
{{filterContent.facetedTitle}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
Contact us
Follow us
