Get this: it’s the day before a family member’s birthday celebrations, and you desperately need a gift under USD 100 that arrives tomorrow…
Instead of rifling across multiple tabs, you simply ask an AI assistant and bam – it understands your needs, evaluates the context and constraints, and recommends a gift choice you feel good about giving. Now imagine having such a personal AI assistant shopper in your lives – someone who deeply understands your budget, lifestyle, and preferences and effortlessly curates tailored product recommendations from thousands of choices, even getting you the best prices and completing transactions autonomously. Suddenly, shopping doesn’t seem like a chore anymore.
Welcome to the era of agentic commerce, where retailers’ most valuable customers might not be humans anymore. AI agents embedded across platforms such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and more are increasingly influencing consumers’ decisions, redefining how they purchase online. A shift of seismic proportions is underway in retail, with Capgemini estimating 25% of global consumers to be already using generative AI (GenAI) shopping tools in 2025, with another 31% already planning to use them in the future. This article delves into the world of agentic commerce and the new era of AI-driven shopping it heralds.
What is Agentic Commerce?
Basically, agentic commerce sees AI agents act on behalf of consumers or businesses, often without direct human intervention, to research, negotiate, and complete purchases. Unlike traditional e-commerce experiences, AI agents do the lion’s share of the work in agentic commerce. As shoppers, we usually flit between retailers and tabs to evaluate choices, manually entering our information at checkout.
However, in agentic commerce, AI-powered shopping assistants proactively gather all details, scan multiple websites in real time, evaluate products against user constraints and preferences, and even make purchases on their behalf.
Think of agentic commerce as a digital concierge that’s not limited to just online shopping. It’s relevant to a wide range of commerce experiences, including ticketing, travel, digital services, subscriptions, and even physical retail integrations. They’re redefining digital commerce by automating tasks that required active effort on our part earlier. With trust in these systems growing, AI agents will now increasingly take on transactional tasks — think applying stored payment credentials, cross-checking delivery timelines, and completing purchases autonomously.
How Agentic Commerce Is Changing The Shopping Experience
Consumers haven taken to agentic shopping technologies quickly, with Adobe Data for July 2025 showing traffic to American retail sites from GenAI chatbots and browsers having increased a whopping 4,700% year-over-year. What’s more, these users are already engaging more deeply: they have a 27% lower bounce rate, browse 10% more pages, and spend 32% more time on the website.
Major industry players like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity have already begun embedding comprehensive commerce functionalities into their AI platforms. Perplexity, in particular, has moved very quickly, having initially launched the “Buy with Pro.” It allows users to browse products and complete one-click purchases directly from specific merchants. Subsequently, it integrated the behind-the-scenes connector of Firmly.ai, which allows merchants to easily link to Perplexity. Furthermore, it partnered with PayPal to roll out streamlined and secure checkout services within the chat interface itself.
That’s not all. Google announced the expansion of its AI Mode last year, adding multiple capabilities since then. For the last month, users have even been seeing shopping results on a “See More” button, loading more products through the Google shopping graph. Soon enough, users will be able to track prices and confirm purchases directly within the platform, with transactions even completing on their behalf via Google Pay once they confirm the purchase.
ChatGPT isn’t far behind, having recently introduced a new feature called “Instant Checkout.” It allows users to complete purchases within the chat window directly. Etsy merchants are first in line to experiment with this rollout, and plans are in place to extend it to Shopify merchants as well.
What Lies Next For Retailers
This isn’t some wait-and-see moment for retailers, as they’ll all have to grapple with the fact that a huge chunk of their customers will be AI agents, and not human users. The challenge for retailers is to get out in front of it now and gain first-mover advantage, even if it’s in small ways.
Their success hinges on reorienting their platforms to make them easily discoverable by third-party agents and launching their own set of AI agents who can operate in the broader ecosystem, thus preserving brand value in automated interactions.
The rise of AI-assisted retail is a harbinger of how commerce will possibly be conducted on a global scale. However, this is more than just adoption — it’s about engagement too, as users who arrive through AI agents are 10% more engaged than traditional visitors and have a stronger purchasing intent.
Clearly, AI agents aren’t just the next big digital innovation — they’re fundamentally reshaping the global retail landscape. Retailers need to move quickly by building AI-native experiences and investing in agentic capabilities to define the next era of operational efficiency, brand relevance, and customer engagement. The window to lead is closing in, and waiting to act is risking being rendered invisible in today’s fast-moving digital age.
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