Much like with generative artificial intelligence, the emergence of agentic AI has been accompanied by substantial hoopla. However, as more organizations race to incorporate the next big thing into their operations, many are struggling to plot the road map to agentic commerce.
As Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, detailed in the report Making Sense of Agentic Commerce: How Do We Get Started?, businesses and financial institutions can take tangible steps to prepare for agentic commerce. However, depending on the organization, a speedy implementation may not be the best approach.
The Vision Is Real
Agentic commerce has been defined as leveraging an AI agent to automate all aspects of a transaction, including the purchase, with minimal user interaction. However, if this model were implemented, it would create a dramatic shift in the shopping paradigm.
“Depending upon the form that automation takes, it could have substantial impacts on the ways that companies interact with individuals,” Miller said. “This means if you’re interacting with other people’s software instead of them, you have to do different things. You need to build a different type of front door, you need to build a different ecosystem to respond to the needs of agents, and you potentially have to change your advertising models.”
These are important questions, and many organizations are feeling the pressure to provide answers. This pressure has only increased as leading financial services companies like Visa and Mastercard have launched agentic commerce platforms. Additionally, Visa and Google have created protocols designed to be the framework for the future agentic environment.
These launches have prompted many organizations to wonder if, and how, they should proceed with their own agentic commerce initiatives.
“It’s important to say, ‘No, we’re not there,’” Miller said. “There is a vision; the vision is real; the potential impact is not fake, but what is going on this instant is almost nothing—and I can’t overstate that. There are no agents, that is not a thing that exists yet—in terms of a fully capable agent that can do all of this stuff for you. Zero, and not going to happen anytime soon, but there are emerging capabilities that are parts of that vision.”
An Iterative Move
The first step in getting started with agentic commerce is to identify where the technology is in its evolution and map the ways that AI agents could interact with a business’ products.
Currently, AI primarily factors into the shopping experience is by streamlining the search process and providing curated selections. In some instances, the user can even pay for the subsequent purchase within the AI platform.
“You could search in ChatGPT and say, ‘I want to see some shoes,’ and it’ll show you some shoes and then you could click a ‘buy now’ button—but that’s not an agent in anyone’s vision,” Miller said. “That is, architecturally and infrastructurally, an iterative move from a subscribe and save.”
As far as this reality is from the vision of agentic commerce, the current model has many limitations.
For example, Perplexity users can pay through PayPal directly in the AI chat, and ChatGPT users can make purchases at Etsy and Shopify in the app. These partnerships are steps in the right direction, but they also exemplify the barriers to agentic commerce.
“You could buy one thing from one place using a certain card—so there’s a long way to go,” Miller said. “But it gives companies a good way to understand things: What are the capabilities in the market? How are they emerging? What can they actually do? What are they integrated with? What are the limitations?”
Boring, Straightforward, and Infrastructural
Once organizations understand AI agents’ functionalities, they can begin to identify where the technology is headed.
“You can say, ‘I can see where the next stage of that is—we’re going to see an announcement in three months or we’re going to see an announcement in six months,’” Miller said. “Identify where the foreseeable agent capability maturity curve overlaps with those existing capabilities, and those are the places that you want to try to build to.”
This may prove difficult, as the definition of agentic commerce has already been stretched beyond the boundaries in many instances. Organizations will likely have to continue to scrutinize this technology as they map the ways the capabilities intersect with their products.
Additionally, many businesses may find that they have limited use cases for AI agents, or none at all. For those organizations moving forward with agentic commerce, one of the key factors will be to develop a shared language across any agentic capabilities within the business.
In larger organizations, many leaders and teams are likely to be tasked with implementing agentic AI. This means that it will be critical to coordinate agentic commerce projects across the organization to ensure this game-changing technology is deployed in a routine fashion.
“This sounds fancy and new and futuristic, and the reality is it’s mostly crushingly dull,” Miller said. “Automation is not interesting, in and of itself. Agents are just accelerated work, and if it was boring work to start with, it doesn’t become interesting because you automated it. This thing gets handed to people as if it is new and crazy and futuristic, but it must be delivered as something that is boring, straightforward, and infrastructural.”
The Word Agentic
For all the hype around agentic AI, in many ways it is simply a bolt-on, customer-facing layer within the shopping experience.
“The word agentic is doing a lot of work right now,” Miller said. “Agentic is being used to describe this notion of things being done for you, and it is being presented from the perspective of the end of an evolutionary stage where somehow all this stuff magically happens.
“But the software has to tap into other existing infrastructure—there’s no new payment infrastructure. There is payment infrastructure necessary to identify the agent—that bit is new and interesting and challenging—but at the end of the day, there’s a box in a warehouse that has to get on a truck and end up on my front porch, and none of that is new.”
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