What Is Agentic Commerce?

The process typically unfolds in four stages:

1. Intent Capture. The consumer describes what they want in natural language. “I need a birthday gift for my sister, she likes skincare, budget $75.” The AI agent interprets this intent, extracting product category, price constraints, recipient preferences, and urgency.

2. Discovery and Matching. The agent queries merchant product catalogs using structured data feeds. Unlike traditional search engines that rank web pages, AI agents evaluate product attributes directly -- price, availability, shipping speed, reviews, and relevance to the stated intent. Merchants whose catalogs are optimized for machine readability get recommended. Those with incomplete or unstructured data get skipped.

3. Evaluation and Recommendation. The agent compares options across multiple merchants, weighing factors the consumer specified. It presents a curated shortlist with reasoning: “This moisturizer from Brand X has 4.8 stars, ships free in 2 days, and fits your budget at $68.” The consumer reviews and approves.

4. Transaction Execution. The agent completes the purchase using stored payment credentials, handles shipping selection, and confirms the order -- all within the chat interface. Some platforms support fully autonomous purchasing for low-risk items, while higher-value transactions require explicit consumer approval.

This four-stage flow is enabled by a growing ecosystem of open protocols. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed by Stripe and OpenAI, powers ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), launched at NRF 2026, covers the full commerce journey from discovery to post-purchase. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides the data connectivity layer that lets agents access real-time inventory, pricing, and product details.

Consumer adoption is accelerating faster than mobile commerce did. According to a Morgan Stanley AlphaWise survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers (Nov 2025), 45% had used ChatGPT in the prior month. A January 2026 IBM Institute for Business Value study found 45% of consumers already use AI for some part of the buying journey. And 38% of consumers have used generative AI for online shopping, per Adobe (2025).

Platform infrastructure is production-ready. ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, which evolved from early shopping integrations in late 2025, is now live for all U.S. users, enabling direct purchases inside the chat interface. Etsy and over 1 million Shopify merchants are live. Google launched AI Mode with agentic checkout capabilities, with Wayfair, Chewy, and Etsy among early participants. Microsoft Copilot supports checkout via ACP. Perplexity offers instant purchasing through its PayPal-powered shopping feature.

Open protocol standards are reducing integration complexity. Before September 2025, connecting to AI shopping channels meant custom integration for each platform. The launch of ACP (Sep 2025), followed by MCP's rapid enterprise adoption, and UCP's debut at NRF 2026 (Jan 2026), has created a standardized foundation.

The financial stakes are significant. Adobe Analytics data shows AI-referred visitors have a 38% higher purchase completion rate compared to traditional search visitors (Adobe, Black Friday 2025). Retailers with AI agent integration saw roughly 7x better sales growth during Cyber Week 2025 than those without (Salesforce data, Dec 2025).

ChatGPT Instant Checkout (ACP)

Etsy, Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, Vuori, and over 1 million Shopify merchants are live or rolling out on ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, with Walmart and Target announced as upcoming partners, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Stripe. Merchants pay a 4% fee on completed purchases. OpenAI reports that Instant Checkout items are not preferred in product results -- the feature is purely transactional (OpenAI, Feb 2026).

Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite

Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite, launched December 2025, enables merchants to sell through any ACP-compatible AI agent. URBN (Anthropologie, Free People, Urban Outfitters), Coach, Kate Spade, Revolve, Ashley Furniture, and Etsy are live (Stripe, Dec 2025).

Google AI Mode and UCP

Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF 2026 with co-development from Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and Target. UCP is endorsed by 20+ partners including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Macy's, Home Depot, and Zalando (Google, Jan 2026).

Amazon Rufus

Amazon's AI shopping assistant Rufus serves 300 million users and drove an estimated $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025. Amazon's “Buy for Me” feature attempts to purchase products from third-party websites on behalf of consumers (Business Insider, Jan 2026).

Perplexity Shopping

Perplexity's PayPal-powered shopping feature enables instant purchasing within search results. With over 45 million monthly active users and a $20 billion valuation, Perplexity has become a significant AI commerce channel (Perplexity, 2025).

The protocol landscape is converging. UCP was explicitly designed to be compatible with AP2, A2A, and MCP. A retailer who supports UCP and ACP covers the major AI shopping channels today. Infrastructure platforms like Paz.ai handle multi-protocol compliance through a single integration, translating merchant catalogs into the format each protocol requires.

Approach 1: Platform-Native (Fastest)

Shopify merchants are already auto-enrolled in ChatGPT shopping and Google AI Mode through their existing Shopify feeds. This provides baseline visibility with zero additional work. The tradeoff: no optimization, no branded experience, and limited control over how products appear to AI agents.

Approach 2: Infrastructure Partner (Balanced)

Platforms like Paz.ai connect existing product catalogs to multiple AI shopping channels through a single integration. This approach adds catalog optimization (rewriting product descriptions for AI comprehension), multi-protocol compliance, and analytics -- typically going live in 2-4 weeks.

Approach 3: Custom Build (Maximum Control)

Large retailers like Albertsons have built proprietary AI shopping assistants integrated with their loyalty programs, inventory systems, and fulfillment operations. Albertsons aims to reduce average shopping time from 46 minutes to 4 minutes. This approach requires significant engineering investment ($10M+) and 12-18 months of development, but delivers maximum differentiation.

Most mid-market retailers will start with Approach 1 or 2 and layer on custom capabilities over time. The critical first step is ensuring your product catalog is machine-readable -- AI agents cannot recommend products they cannot understand.

The most consequential shift: in traditional ecommerce, brands compete for consumer attention through design, advertising, and search ranking. In agentic commerce, brands compete for AI agent selection through data quality, protocol compliance, and catalog completeness.

This is why AI visibility -- the discipline of making products discoverable and recommendable by AI agents -- is becoming as critical as SEO was for the search engine era.

Agentic commerce is live, growing, and already generating measurable revenue for retailers who have adopted it. With 50 million daily shopping queries on ChatGPT alone, 805% year-over-year AI traffic growth, and a projected $3-5 trillion global market by 2030, the question is not whether to prepare -- it is how quickly you can act.

The retailers winning today share three traits: their product catalogs are machine-readable, they support multiple AI commerce protocols, and they optimize their data for AI agent comprehension rather than just human browsing.