Agentic commerce will benefit the quickest learners, not the largest retailers
It has taken over 20 years for e-commerce to reach 16% of global retail sales. By comparison, agentic commerce will progress much more rapidly. I predict that it will reach 10% within three to five years.
The widespread consumer adoption of AI technologies, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT with 800 million weekly active users or other AI with 1.5 billion monthly active users, indicates that there is already a large, established audience for agentic commerce.
Brands are realizing that these are new interfaces where consumers researching goods and services may ultimately desire to complete the entire end-to-end purchasing journey.
Similar to the emergence of e-commerce, AI represents a new distribution channel for businesses to understand, but it’s easier because the audience already exists, with over five and a half billion people online, along with the framework of commerce.
If you ask anyone, “In five to 10 years, do you think there will be more purchases made through AI than currently?” Very few people will answer ‘no’. We all know it’s coming; it’s just a matter of how quickly and widely it will be adopted. Will it be a niche for highly confident individuals, or a mainstream market proposition?
The challenge with LLMs is that, similar to many digital markets, we quickly see a “winner takes most” type of market. For example, who is the second most popular? It would be difficult to name someone. If you cede that middle ground and lose the ability to be the answer to a particular type of question a consumer might have, it may be very hard to regain that position later.
Currently, the focus is on exploring the existing AI landscapes and establishing a presence. Many businesses want to engage not only to demonstrate their forward-thinking approach to AI but also because there is potential for real revenue in the medium term.
If you believe that there will be more AI in the world in the future rather than less, it is crucial to gain experience early. If you start developing an agentic commerce option on an LLM platform, the lessons learned will enable you to build second and third generations. If you choose to wait for two or three years and then enter the market, you will be starting from scratch and still need to go through all the steps to acquire those learnings and improve your offerings.
One advantage of getting in early is that it is less risky. This is because one of the key byproducts of AI is the data it generates, which is data you wouldn’t otherwise have, and it can inform your development cycle to enhance and accelerate it. When people think about AI, they often overlook that the “exhaust” (the data being produced) is the real valuable asset. This data can assist in answering questions you struggle with, such as what factors lead to a sale and what do not. Without a way to capture and understand this information, you can only observe the overall growth and not the underlying details.
As a brand, if you decide to wait until agentic commerce has reached a large scale before participating, you are starting from the beginning and do not yet have an optimized process for managing these aspects, handling returns, formulating your promotional strategy, or managing the process across different AI engines. The potential downside risk is much lower if you enter early and gain experience before it scales.
Everyone frequently discusses cost savings and productivity improvements with AI, but there are few actual examples that focus on top-line growth. Now, here is a new channel that could potentially generate new growth opportunities, and particularly since there is no front-end to deal with (as the front-end is provided by AI), margins may be higher.
One example of a brand actively exploring the potential of agentic commerce is [brand name], which partnered with OpenAI in September 2025. Shopify’s quarterly results, to be released this week, will be some of the first clear indicators of whether agentic commerce is gaining traction. Although it may not have a significant impact on their quarterly revenue, many are closely watching Shopify because they were among the first, if not the first, to enable some of their merchants to go online. Now, we have a full quarter’s worth of data to see if this is starting to take off.
While it may not contribute significantly to Shopify’s Q4 2025 results, this will influence the future value of their business. I believe it is disproportionately important for the overall valuation of their business. So even if it is not reflected in the numerical results, I expect it to be prominently featured in the narrative.
What a platform like Shopify is doing is bringing AI capabilities to every small business. And if you are a large retailer, you should be considering and asking, “Well, these mid-market companies now have the ability to go live immediately through their partnership with Shopify. With our in-house developed platform, how prepared are we to move forward?” This could put large corporations at a disadvantage unless they are evolving at the same pace as Shopify.