Agentic Commerce 101

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is a new model of online commerce where AI-powered agents can act on behalf of customers during the shopping process – searching for items, comparing options, and even completing purchases. These AI agents are tools that can autonomously make decisions and execute tasks – with limited or no input needed.

Different types of agentic commerce:

There are various different types of agentic commerce, including:

• AI referrals: An agentic platform (e.g. ChatGPT) refers traffic to a merchant site in response to a user’s prompt.
• AI-assisted shopping: An AI agent handles most of the shopping experience (e.g. browsing, product comparisons, adding to cart), but a user is still present in the process and required to complete the transaction.
• Fully autonomous agents: An AI agent can autonomously complete the entire shopping experience and checkout – without any user involvement.

What are some live examples of agentic commerce?

• With Perplexity Pro, users can leverage an autonomous AI agent to handle the complete shopping experience – from start-to-purchase.
• With OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, a user can buy directly from Etsy right in the ChatGPT chat window. This leverages OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol – a standard that enables AI agents, consumers, and businesses to work together and complete purchases.

Key implications for merchants:

• Consumers are searching and discovering products and merchants in new ways.
• With agentic transactions, AI shopping platforms are becoming intermediaries between merchants and their consumers.
• The customer data that merchants receive from agentic transactions will be reduced (and likely lower quality) than from typical ecommerce transactions.
• The ecommerce ecosystem is changing – with new payment protocols, and platforms, and merchants will need to adapt to these to accept agentic transactions.