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What is agentic commerce?
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What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is the use of AI agents to carry out both consumer-facing, buying-related tasks on a person’s behalf — such as finding product options, comparing them, or completing a purchase — and back-of-house operations, including customer support, returns coordination, and even order fulfillment.
What is agentic shopping?
Although “agentic shopping” is related to “agentic commerce”, the terms aren’t interchangeable. Coined by Google, “agentic shopping” can best be understood as the consumer-facing part of agentic commerce, i.e. how shoppers use or delegate to AI tools in order to discover, compare, and buy products and services.
What is the state of agentic commerce today?
This is a burgeoning technology. Although agentic commerce experiences are still being tested and developed, it's important to be aware that this is the direction e-commerce is heading: AI agent-powered experiences built into the shopping infrastructure.
In fact, e-commerce giants have already built several agentic shopping experiences into their flow: Amazon’s “Buy-for-Me” feature follows at the heels of their Rufus AI shopping assistant debut last year, and the introduction of Alexa+. In June 2025, Walmart announced Sparky, an AI assistant that “synthesizes reviews, offers occasion-based recommendations, and helps customers plan, compare and purchase with confidence.” OpenAI has the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January 2026 to serve as a translation layer between retailers and AI systems. Other major retailers are actively developing agentic commerce solutions as well.
How agentic commerce shows up in AI search
1) Discovery journeys that happen inside an assistant
For example, Perplexity describes its shopping experience as conversational search that “moves seamlessly from discovery to decision” in one flow. A consumer describes what they want, then the assistant can ask follow-up questions, and compare and/or recommend product options.
2) Checkout built into AI search via shared protocols
Platforms are creating shared protocols so merchants don’t need custom integrations for every new AI agent. For example:
- OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025, tied to their open-source Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which facilitates in-app purchases.
- Google partnered with Shopify and others to launch their Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January 2026, along the same lines, with the intention to enable agentic actions within Google’s own AI experiences.
These protocols are the connective tissue that allows agents to complete purchases without sending shoppers through multiple steps on multiple sites.
What does agentic commerce mean for brands?
E-commerce arrived in the late 90s, but it hasn't replaced brick-and-mortar — it's offered another way to buy. We expect a similar story for agentic commerce and e-commerce. Brands can expect it to take a share of the market, without fully replacing it.
Imagine if your company had never embraced the shift to e-commerce. You’d be missing out on an entire customer segment. Along that same line, if an AI agent can’t discover what you offer, it can’t recommend (or purchase from) your brand to shoppers who adopt agentic commerce. Brands that show up consistently will be the ones with information that is easy to access and interpret.
Q&A
What does "agentic" mean?
In terms of artificial intelligence, agentic tools are those that have the autonomy to reason and act on behalf of users. For example, an agentic shopper can search for and compare products, determine the best option, recommend purchases, and complete purchases.
What makes agentic shopping different from Google Shopping?
Google Shopping requires you (humans) to complete actions such as searching for, comparing, and purchasing products, and relies on keywords to surface results. Agentic shopping takes over the purchase flow on behalf of consumers and takes action based on conversational prompts and contextual clues within product data.
What's the difference between the two protocols, UCP and ACP?
Both Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) are open standards designed to enable AI agents to discover and purchase products on behalf of consumers, but they come from different ecosystems and take different approaches.
UCP is Google's protocol, backed by a wide coalition of partners including Shopify, Visa, Walmart, and Stripe. It focuses on broad interoperability across the entire shopping journey from discovery to post-purchase. It uses decentralized discovery, meaning merchants can publish their capabilities on their own domain without going through a central gatekeeper.
ACP is OpenAI's protocol, built in partnership with Stripe. It focuses more narrowly on secure checkout within conversational AI assistants like ChatGPT, and relies on centralized discovery through OpenAI's approval process. Microsoft has also adopted ACP for use within Copilot.
The two protocols are not direct competitors. Google has stated they're designed to coexist. Merchants should plan to support both, as each serves different AI surfaces and ecosystems.
How can I impact how my brand shows up in agentic commerce?
Visibility in agentic commerce starts with visibility in AI search. When a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy, the assistant has to choose products and justify those choices.
What to do:
- Make sure product pages are easy for AI crawlers to access and interpret.
- Create content to support decision-making, such as FAQs and shipping and returns policies.
- Enrich product content and data to provide extra context that supports the customer journey.
- Update measurement strategies to track how your brand appears inside AI answers.
- Consider how your brand may want to integrate shared agentic protocols to better support both consumer-side and brand-side e-commerce flows.
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