Agentic commerce: Compete in an AI-buyer world: PwC

Today’s AI agents research product options, compare providers, and initiate purchases on behalf of consumers. This shift is redefining how brands are found, trusted, and transacted with across B2C and B2B journeys. It also changes what happens downstream: fulfilment, inventory, and operations respond to faster, more variable demand created by agent-driven decisions.

For leaders, the question isn’t whether agentic commerce is coming. Agentic commerce is already here. The question is now: Is your brand discoverable, comparable, and preferred in an AI-mediated marketplace—by both consumers and AI agents?

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is a new model of digital buying where AI agents act on behalf of customers to interpret needs, compare options, and complete transactions. These agents read signals—consumer and business goals, preferences, and known constraints like price sensitivity—and use them to browse, assess, and recommend products or services across channels.

In practice, that can look like virtual shoppers that help consumers compare, choose, and complete transactions; AI assistants that support procurement teams in decision-making and purchasing; or agents that coordinate multi-step B2B transactions end to end. From an enterprise perspective, agentic commerce doesn’t replace your commerce strategy—it extends it, adding a new layer where AI agents participate in the journey, and in some cases, lead it.

Success in agentic commerce means becoming the top recommendation, where AI agents consistently surface your products, trust your data enough to act on it, and complete the purchase on your behalf. To achieve this, your brand should be:

Discoverable: Not just indexed but interpretable by AI agents
Trustworthy: With structured, accurate, verifiable product and experience data
Structured: With clean data and processes that agents can reliably act on
Transactable: With checkout, payment, and fulfillment paths that AI agents can complete securely end-to-end

Your existing investments aren’t obsolete; they’re the foundation. You’ve modernized commerce for customers. The next step is modernizing it for AI agents. That means making sure your products and content are interpretable and verifiable and that transactions can be completed securely, reliably, and end-to-end in an AI-mediated marketplace. Are you ready for AI buyers as well as human ones?

Why it matters to the C-suite

Reinventing where growth happens

Agentic commerce marks a structural shift in how growth happens. AI agents are becoming new intermediaries that direct demand toward the brands they can understand, verify, and trust. For CEOs and boards, the imperative is clear: modernize now or risk ceding visibility, comparability, and market share to competitors that move faster.

Competing in AI-first journeys

Your buyers now include AI. Structured, accurate, and intent-focused content determines whether you’re found, considered, and recommended. That means customer attraction strategies that work for humans and AI agents shaping what appears in the cart.

Architecting for AI-buyer readiness

Agentic commerce depends on clean, structured data; headless architectures; and APIs that surface real-time product, pricing, and availability information. Enterprises depend on security, fraud, identity, and integration layers that allow for safe, controlled interactions with AI agents.

Rethinking fulfillment dynamics

AI-driven demand may move faster and fluctuate more. That means flexible fulfilment, integrated order management, and reliable inventory signals to support high-frequency, agent-initiated transactions and to keep service steady as volume shifts.

Redefining experience and conversion models

Agentic commerce reshapes how digital channels attract, convert, and serve customers, with experiences designed for both humans and AI agents. Product and digital teams should rethink roadmaps, experiment pipelines, and KPIs to support autonomous journeys that drive measurable growth across channels.

Get started with agentic commerce

1. Establish cross-functional ownership

Define ownership across digital, payments, technology, and policy so decisions move quickly and teams stay coordinated.

2. Prepare your product catalog

Confirm your products and content are discoverable, accurate, structured, and enriched with the details that enable AI agents to interpret, compare, and surface reliably. This includes new forms of intent-led content and metadata.

3. Ready your order and fulfillment systems

Make sure agent-initiated orders flow through your order management systems, fulfillment processes, and core APIs and integrations as reliably as human-initiated ones. Confirm your data, pricing, inventory, and checkout services are accessible to agent surfaces.

4. Update customer experience and policy rules

Review and align policies for returns, delivery, eligibility, and checkout to match AI-mediated journeys and maintain visibility in agent-driven channels. Make sure content, experience, and logic reflect both human and agent decision paths.

5. Monitor and optimize performance

Treat agentic commerce as a new digital channel. Track conversion, latency, and discovery signals using KPIs tailored to agent-based behavior.

What agentic commerce looks like in practice and how we can help get you there

Whether you’re experimenting or scaling, we meet you where you are. PwC can help you bring agentic commerce to life by building on your existing commerce and AI investments.

Category-defining capabilities
Commerce and AI agent integration
Enterprise strategy and responsible governance
Measurement, optimization, and scale

Category-defining capabilities

You have a clear, shared view of what agentic commerce is and how it applies across your business model, including:

Cross-team alignment on how AI agents participate across B2C, direct-to-consumer (DTC), B2B, and marketplace journeys.
A quantified business case that sizes the revenue and margin upside, cost-to-serve implications, risks of inaction, and the investment required to compete and win.
Clear ownership and decision rights across commercial/merchandising, product, technology, and operations so accountability is defined and decisions move quickly.

How we can help

Set a shared vision for agentic commerce across B2B, B2C, DTC, and marketplaces.
Prioritize agentic use cases across customer attraction, merchandising, checkout, and supply chain.
Align agentic commerce with your enterprise AI strategy, risk, and governance.

Commerce and AI agent integration

AI agents plug into your commerce stack rather than operating at the edges, drawing on structured product, pricing, and content data to guide discovery and decision-making.
AI agents help with merchandising, checkout, and supply chain coordination to unlock growth and improve the buyer experience.
Agents support autonomous interactions that enhance conversion, speed fulfillment, and increase customer satisfaction.

How we can help

Design customer journeys where consumers and AI agents can both complete end-to-end orders successfully.
Make product and content assets easy for agents to find, read, and use.
Apply your customer attraction strategies to AI-mediated journeys.
Extend headless and composable commerce architectures so AI agents can plug in cleanly.
Connect commerce, CPQ (configure, price, quote) data, and order management through Agile Commerce, a tech-enabled solution developed by PwC, to support guided selling, real-time pricing, and seamless fulfillment.

Enterprise strategy and responsible governance

You’ve established the strategy, rules, and oversight required to deploy AI agents safely and effectively, this includes:

Defining what agents can do, how their decisions are monitored, and how exceptions escalate.
Embedding risk, cybersecurity, legal, compliance, and responsible AI across each stage of the agent-driven journey.

How we can help

Refresh your digital operating models for agent-driven flows, roles, skills, and decision rights.
Clarify who owns what across business, technology, risk, and compliance for AI-driven commerce.

Measurement, optimization, and scale

Agentic commerce is treated as a new digital channel with its own performance signals.

You track discovery, conversion, latency, fulfillment, and exception rates across agent-driven journeys.
Insights are used to continuously optimize ranking, recommendation, and transaction success.

How we can help

Implement analytics and AI to monitor and to help improve agentic journeys over time.
Use managed services to operate and scale commerce capabilities as your agentic adoption grows.

Agentic commerce

What is agentic commerce?