Why agentic commerce is the new front door to retail
Why agentic commerce is the new front door to retail
Publish Date: 2026-02-09 13:00:00
Source Domain: www.microsoft.com
Summary
The article illustrates how AI-driven conversations are transforming retail by replacing traditional search results and offering more intuitive, personalized shopping experiences. The shift towards “agentic commerce,” where AI shopping agents provide context-aware recommendations through natural language conversations, is gaining momentum. The adoption of AI tools for product comparison and research is already prevalent, and it indicates a massive change in how product discoveries, evaluations, and purchases happen. This change requires CMOs and marketers to rethink how influence and loyalty are built by shaping decisions in real-time and leveraging actionable insights from these AI-driven interactions. To stay competitive, brands must not only be discoverable in AI platforms but also own the intelligence that drives these conversations on their own properties. As agentic commerce evolves, retail strategies must evolve too, optimizing product data for AI, designing for openness and portability, and ensuring measurement transparency to turn every interaction into sustained business growth.
Key Points:
- A growing number of US consumers are using generative AI for product research and decision-making, marking a shift towards AI-guided shopping experiences.
- Agentic commerce represents a fundamental change in how influence is gained and loyalty is built, leveraging real-time conversations to shape purchasing decisions.
- Companies could potentially reap significant revenue from agentic commerce, projected to reach up to $5 trillion globally by 2030.
- To compete, brands should focus on ensuring product discoverability through AI and developing owned conversational experiences to capture valuable interaction data.
- Trust in brand-owned AI agents is crucial, as consumers trust these more than third-party ones, making them more effective for driving conversion.
