AGENTIC COMMERCE: THE $10 TRILLION AI SHOPPING REVOLUTION

S. Mohini Ratna
Editor, VARINDIA

Agentic commerce is poised to redefine the very foundations of how consumers shop and how merchants sell. Unlike traditional e-commerce, where humans manually search, compare, and transact, agentic commerce introduces AI agents that act autonomously on behalf of users.

These agents understand intent, anticipate needs, navigate options, negotiate prices, and complete purchases through multi-step reasoning and execution. What we are witnessing is not an incremental improvement—but a structural shift in the global commerce engine.

At its core, agentic commerce represents a transition from platform-led shopping to intent- led orchestration. Instead of consumers hopping across apps, websites, marketplaces, and payment gateways, AI agents stitch together a seamless journey across services. The shopping experience becomes invisible, fast, and frictionless—optimized for outcomes rather than interfaces. Consumers express intent; agents deliver results.
 
The economic implications are staggering. According to McKinsey, by 2030 the US B2C retail market alone could generate nearly $1 trillion in agent-orchestrated commerce. On a global scale, projections range between $3 trillion and $5 trillion, with broader AI-driven commerce ecosystems pushing the opportunity toward $10 trillion. This scale rivals, and potentially exceeds, the combined impact of the web and mobile commerce revolutions.

One reason agentic commerce will scale faster than past shifts is that AI agents can “ride on the rails” already built. They traverse existing digital infrastructure—e- commerce sites, payment rails, logistics APIs, and identity systems—without waiting for entirely new ecosystems to be built. This accelerates adoption dramatically, compressing decades of transformation into years.

For consumers, the benefits are profound. Shopping becomes hyper-personalized, proactive, and efficient. AI agents can monitor prices, inventory, preferences, budgets, sustainability goals, and even emotional context. They can reorder essentials automatically, suggest alternatives in real time, and negotiate better terms—all while maintaining alignment with user values and consent.

For merchants, however, the shift is double-edged. Agentic commerce introduces new gatekeepers—AI agents that decide what gets surfaced, recommended, or purchased. Traditional brand discovery, SEO, paid advertising, and loyalty programs will no longer function as they do today. Merchants must learn how to sell to agents, not just humans, optimizing for machine-readable trust, pricing logic, fulfillment reliability, and intent relevance.

This transformation also raises new challenges around trust, identity, and risk. Autonomous agents executing financial transactions demand re-architected identity systems, consent frameworks, fraud controls, and dispute mechanisms. Who is accountable when an agent makes a wrong decision? How is trust established between agents, merchants, platforms, and consumers? These questions are central to the success of agentic commerce.

From a technical standpoint, enabling this future requires mastery of new agent- native protocols and standards. Emerging frameworks such as Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocols, Agent Payments Protocols (AP2), and Agentic Commerce Protocols (ACP) are becoming the connective tissue of this ecosystem. These standards allow agents to communicate, transact, negotiate, and authenticate across platforms autonomously and securely.

Business models will inevitably evolve. Monetization may shift from impressions and clicks to outcome-based fees, orchestration margins, and agent-to-agent referral economics. Marketing will transform from persuasion to machine relevance signaling. Many intermediaries—marketplaces, aggregators, comparison engines—face existential choices: build your own agents, partner with them, or risk disintermediation.

Early-moving organizations are already preparing by building agent-ready commerce layers—APIs, structured catalogs, dynamic pricing engines, programmable loyalty, and identity-aware checkout flows. They recognize that future competitive advantage will not come from prettier storefronts, but from being the most trusted, machine- comprehensible, and execution-ready option in an agent’s decision graph.

Ultimately, agentic commerce requires a fundamental rethinking of how value is created, captured, and delivered. Companies that adapt quickly will not just meet evolving consumer expectations—they will redefine entire industries. The era of agentic commerce is not coming—it has already begun.
Companies have spent decades optimizing consumer journeys around human behavior—perfecting every click, scroll, and tap. In the era of agentic commerce, however, consumers are no longer the sole navigators of the buying journey. AI agents now act as digital proxies, making millions of micro-decisions on their behalf across platforms and services.

This shift demands a fundamental rethink of engagement strategies. Brands must redesign the entire commerce stack—not just for human preferences, but for machine- driven decisioning that values trust signals, intent clarity, pricing logic, and execution reliability. Success will depend on becoming agent-ready, not just user-friendly.