Agentic commerce refers to the emerging model in which AI agents - autonomous software systems capable of reasoning, planning, and taking multi-step actions - participate in the shopping process on behalf of consumers or merchants. Rather than a shopper manually searching, comparing, and checking out, an AI agent handles some or all of those steps: researching products across multiple stores, evaluating options against stated criteria, and completing a purchase with minimal human intervention.
From the consumer side, agentic commerce is already beginning to reshape discovery. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are increasingly the first stop for product research - not Google Search. A shopper asking 'What's the best zinc supplement for immune support under $40?' is receiving an AI-curated recommendation, not a list of links to evaluate manually. The AI agent becomes a purchase intermediary. For e-commerce brands, this means the rules of discoverability are changing: optimizing for AI recommendation engines requires different tactics than traditional SEO, and brands that get recommended by AI agents will capture disproportionate share.
From the merchant side, AI agents are automating complex operational workflows that previously required human judgment: repricing products in response to competitor changes, drafting and scheduling email campaigns based on inventory levels, routing customer service cases, and identifying and reordering low-stock SKUs. Shopify is actively building agentic infrastructure - Shopify Sidekick is an early example of an AI agent embedded directly in the merchant dashboard, capable of executing store management tasks through conversation.
For growth marketers, the strategic implication of agentic commerce is twofold: your brand needs to be legible and trustworthy to AI systems doing product research on behalf of consumers (structured data, strong reviews, clear product claims), and your internal operations need to be structured so AI agents can act on them - clean data, integrated systems, and MCP-compatible tooling.
.png)
.png)
