Agentic commerce is moving quickly...
The big LLMs are moving fast to provide shoppable commerce experiences on their platforms. Perplexity launched ‘shop like a pro’ in November last year, ChatGPT is planning deeper native integration into its platform, and Microsoft launched its own merchant program last month.
In the last few weeks, major payment providers such as Mastercard, VISA, Stripe and Paypal have all announced they are opening their platforms to agentic systems.
In parallel, business leaders are having to react to this pace of change. Marketers are starting to grapple with Generative Search Optimisation (GEO) as agentic platforms show results based on a set of values very different from traditional search.
And technology leaders are working out how best to integrate with these platforms in addition to dealing with impacts on their IT environments across a broad range of areas – from architecture, latency and cost, to data, governance and risk.
…but this is just the beginning
Agentic commerce will have a profound impact on the retail sector and fundamentally change the way we shop.
It will accelerate existing trends such as commoditisation, squeeze the middle ground and create disintermediation risk. Agentic algorithms will focus in on product values only, prioritising price, reviews and product descriptors, meaning brand messaging and broad product placements will be ignored. The digital advertising model will likely look very different in the coming years.
That’s not all. Agentic commerce will fundamentally rewrite the customer experience – offering highly automated ‘zero-click’ shopping experiences, increasingly through voice-over-screen capabilities.
This begins to pose some significant questions for retailers. On one hand, how do brands offer a simple, automated, agent-assisted journey for products where convenience, price and/or product are known?
On the other hand, how do brands preserve the emotion and joy of shopping for certain things when discovery and search are core to what we like about the experience? How to retain those ‘surprise and delight’ moments with an unexpected product, cheaper price, or offer is a key point to consider.
Agentic systems don’t respond to emotional storytelling or broad brand targeting. Because product quality, data clarity, fulfilment reliability and contextual relevance all become key, marketers will need to prepare for a more data-driven, technical set of capabilities to drive performance.
This is a complex and fast-moving space, but we've identified 6 key imperatives for organisations to understand and take action on:
- Navigate competitive disruption: Organisations should reassess their business strategy for the agentic era – specifically by looking at channels and value proposition, and evaluating disintermediation risk. As well as understanding how to take advantage of the agentic opportunity, they need to be aware of the impacts of not moving quickly enough.
- Embed agentic marketing: Marketing teams should look at the impacts of agentic on the brand strategy, in addition to ensuring product data and pricing are easily searchable by agentic platforms, and products easily surfaced.
- Customer experience: Organisations should automate what makes sense but keep the joy when it matters. Decision fatigue kills conversion and agentic offers an opportunity to solve for it – but it will be crucial to understand when this is what a customer wants vs when to protect what can be one of the key moments of joy in shopping (searching for and discovering the right product).
- Build for real-time agility: Demand signals, pricing, inventory, and customer needs must be responded to dynamically. Static processes are no longer fit for purpose. Agentic AI operates contextually and in real time, allowing businesses to react instantly to inventory changes, promotions, and customer needs – improving responsiveness and boosting customer satisfaction.
- Solve for data, ethics and consumer trust: As AI-driven decisions increase, businesses will have to actively manage data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency to maintain consumer trust. Greater autonomy means that instead of investing their trust largely in brands, consumers will need to know how their data is being used, why certain options are suggested, and what controls they have. In this new world, governance and design ethics are commercial levers.
- Enable operational efficiency with agentic: Core workflows, from vendor onboarding to pricing and fulfilment, can be automated so they become adaptive. This enables businesses to scale operations intelligently and efficiently without proportionally increasing human oversight.
The time to get started? Now
The direction of travel is clear.
Within five years, AI will be fully embedded into the purchase journey, and as latest Cognizant Research suggests, AI enthusiasts will be driving consumer spending by $690B in the UK alone, with more than half of consumer purchasing driven by AI.
Businesses that adapt to this new reality will thrive.
If you have any questions about agentic commerce, and what it means for your business and your consumers check out our New Minds New Markets – Cognizant Research - we’d love to hear from you.
