# 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 <u>Agentic Commerce Protocol</u> – 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.