Agentic Commerce Is Here: What CMOs and Founders Need to Know
AI shopping agents are transforming ecommerce. Learn how agentic commerce will reshape customer acquisition and what you need to do now to stay competitive.
If you're running an ecommerce brand right now, you've probably heard about ChatGPT Shopping. Maybe you've seen the headlines about AI agents, or watched a demo of someone buying products through a conversation. And you're probably wondering what this means for your business.
The honest answer? It's a bigger shift than most people realize. But not in the way you might think.
We're entering what's being called the agentic commerce era. It's not another buzzword destined for the marketing graveyard. It's a fundamental shift in how people shop, and it's happening faster than most brands realize.
What Actually Is Agentic Commerce?
Strip away the jargon, and agentic commerce is straightforward: AI agents that can shop, compare, and buy products on behalf of consumers. These aren't chatbots that answer FAQs. They're autonomous systems that understand intent, evaluate options, negotiate, and complete transactions.
Think about how you shop today. You Google a product, open fifteen tabs, read reviews, compare prices, check specifications, and maybe remember to use a coupon code you saw three days ago. It's exhausting.
With agentic commerce, you tell an AI what you need. It finds the best options based on your preferences, budget, and past behavior. Then it completes the purchase. The entire process happens in one conversation.
PayPal just integrated with ChatGPT to enable exactly this. Visa is building a Trusted Agent Protocol to help retailers work with AI shopping assistants. These aren't pilot programs. They're multi-billion dollar companies placing massive bets on this future.
The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore
McKinsey forecasts that agentic commerce could generate between $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global sales by 2030. That's not total ecommerce revenue. That's revenue specifically flowing through AI agents.
In the United States alone, they project $1 trillion in orchestrated retail revenue through agentic commerce by the same year. To put that in perspective, total US ecommerce revenue in 2024 was around $1.2 trillion.
This isn't a small channel. Within five years, it could rival the entire ecommerce market we spent two decades building.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
If you're a CMO or founder, your instinct might be to add this to the long list of channels to worry about eventually. After all, you're already managing paid search, social, email, SMS, influencer partnerships, and everything else.
But agentic commerce is different. Here's why.
Discovery Works Differently
In traditional ecommerce, you optimize for search keywords. You buy ads. You hope your SEO strategy surfaces your products when someone searches "best running shoes."
In agentic commerce, the AI agent makes the recommendation. It synthesizes information from product feeds, reviews, blogs, and structured data. It evaluates fit based on the specific context of what the shopper needs.
If your product data is incomplete, if you're not in the conversation, if your attributes are weaker than competitors, you simply won't get recommended. There's no second page of results. The agent picks three options, and yours isn't one of them.
The Winner Takes All Effect
Google search gave you a fighting chance if you were on page one. AI shopping gives you a fighting chance if you're in the top three recommendations. Maybe five if the shopper is particularly curious.
Brands with better data, stronger source authority, and complete product catalogs will dominate. Smaller brands that optimize well can compete. But brands that ignore this shift? They'll become invisible.
Speed Matters More Than Ever
The half-life of competitive advantage in ecommerce keeps shrinking. When Google Shopping launched, you had quarters to adapt. With social commerce, you had months.
With agentic commerce, you have weeks. ChatGPT Shopping is live. Perplexity has shopping features. Google is integrating AI recommendations into search. The infrastructure is being built right now, and the brands winning today are the ones that prepared six months ago.
What You Actually Need to Do
This isn't the part where I tell you to "embrace AI" or "think strategically." You need concrete actions, so here they are.
1. Audit Your Product Data Immediately
Most product catalogs are built for humans browsing websites. They're not built for AI agents parsing structured data.
You need complete, accurate attributes for every SKU. Not just title and price. We're talking materials, dimensions, use cases, compatibility, care instructions, sustainability information, everything.
AI agents prioritize products with rich, detailed data. If an agent is choosing between your product and a competitor's, and your competitor has better data, you lose.
2. Understand Where You Rank Today
You can't optimize what you don't measure. You need to know where your products appear in AI shopping conversations right now.
Run simulations. Ask ChatGPT what it would recommend for queries related to your products. Check if you're being mentioned. See who's ranking above you and figure out why.
Tools like Wildcard exist specifically to solve this problem. The platform runs on-demand rankings, tracks product performance across AI shopping platforms, and shows you exactly what's working and what needs fixing. The visibility gap is real, but it's solvable.
This isn't vanity analytics. This is understanding your position in a channel that could represent half your revenue in three years.
3. Optimize for Source Authority
AI agents don't just look at your product feed. They synthesize information from across the web. Reviews, blogs, comparisons, mentions in trusted publications.
If your competitors are being cited by authoritative sources and you're not, that's a problem. You need a strategy to build that authority. PR matters again, but in a different way. Getting featured in the right publications signals to AI agents that you're a category leader.
4. Fix Checkout Friction
One of the biggest promises of agentic commerce is instant checkout. A shopper decides they want something, and the purchase completes without leaving the conversation.
If you're not set up for this, you're creating friction that will send customers to competitors who are. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) that OpenAI built is one path. Integrations with platforms like PayPal are another. But you need a plan.
5. Test and Iterate Weekly
The algorithms powering these AI agents are evolving constantly. What works today might not work next month. You need a system for testing, measuring, and iterating.
Brands treating this like a set-it-and-forget-it channel will lose. Brands treating it like performance marketing, constantly testing and optimizing, will win.
The Reality Check
I'm not going to tell you agentic commerce will replace your website or that traditional ecommerce is dead. It won't, and it's not.
But here's what I will tell you: In 2010, if you told a retail CMO they needed a mobile-optimized site, many would have said "our customers don't shop on phones." By 2015, mobile was 30% of ecommerce traffic. By 2020, it was over 50%.
The same thing is happening with agentic commerce, except faster. The infrastructure is already being built. The consumer behavior is already shifting. The only question is whether you're going to adapt in time.
What Success Looks Like
The brands winning in agentic commerce today aren't necessarily the biggest ones. They're the ones who saw this coming and prepared.
They invested in their product data. They built relationships with authoritative sources. They tested their rankings and fixed what was broken. They enabled instant checkout before it was cool.
And when AI shopping went mainstream, they were ready. Their products got recommended. Their conversion rates stayed high. They captured market share while competitors scrambled to catch up.
The Bottom Line
Agentic commerce is not a trend. It's not a nice-to-have. It's the next fundamental shift in how people shop.
You don't need to have all the answers today. But you do need to start moving. Audit your data. Understand your rankings. Build a plan. Test your assumptions.
Because in twelve months, this conversation will be very different. The brands that prepared will be talking about growth and market share. The ones that waited will be talking about how to catch up.
Which conversation do you want to be having?