commerce agentique

Shopify reported AI-driven traffic up 7x and AI-driven orders up 11x over 2025, and Salesforce put agent-generated sales at 20% of retail. Agentic commerce is the arrangement behind those numbers: AI agents buying on behalf of consumers.

The infrastructure got standardised twice in four months. OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol has run since September 2025, taking 4% per transaction across five REST endpoints. Sundar Pichai launched Google's Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF on 11 January 2026 under Apache 2.0, co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy and Wayfair, with four transports including Anthropic's MCP. Stripe and commercetools announced a third, the Agentic Commerce Suite, the next day. Amazon, holding 40% of US e-commerce, stayed outside and blocked OpenAI's crawlers, withdrawing 600 million products.

Consumer behaviour is less settled than the protocol race. Riskified found 73% of shoppers using AI somewhere in the process, only 13% letting it complete the purchase, and trust in AI advice at 36% against 38% for human salespeople. Figures compiled at NRF 2026 put consumer trust in AI to transact at 24%.

Max Thilén treats attribution as the main casualty: 70-90% of purchase journeys are already invisible to conventional analytics, and agentic commerce pushes that towards 100%. The Oliver Wyman Forum's October 2026 reading is operational, holding that the seller must verify the agent, the customer, and the mandate the agent carries. Jeff Otto of Riskified raises the unanswered one: who bears liability when a transaction goes wrong through an AI intermediary, merchant or assistant?