The Rise of Agentic Commerce: How AI Shopping Agents Are Rewriting Retail

Executive Summary

Agentic Commerce marks a transformative shift in the digital commerce landscape, where AI agents—not consumers—drive product discovery, decision-making, and purchases. As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity become the starting point for shopping journeys, traditional eCommerce strategies centered around SEO, site UX, and human-led funnels are rapidly losing relevance.

Consumers are increasingly trusting AI to manage repetitive and research-heavy purchases, with 51% of Gen-Z customers starting their searches on LLMs, and platforms are accelerating toward shoppable LLM environments. In this new environment, if your catalog, pricing, and fulfillment data cannot be understood and acted on by intelligent agents, your brand risks being filtered out altogether.

Key points covered include:

• What Agentic Commerce is and how it works through autonomous, AI-powered shopping agents
• Why site traffic is declining, especially from younger demographics, due to LLM-based search and AI-generated answers replacing traditional navigation
• The danger of betting on a single AI platform, and the importance of a one-to-many strategy that ensures interoperability across ecosystems
• The structural and technical changes required to participate in Agentic Commerce, including machine-readable product data, API-native fulfillment, and tokenized transactions

The message is clear: the era of Agentic Commerce is not just coming, it has already begun. It’s not just that brands and retailers that invest now in becoming agent-ready will position themselves to retain visibility, capture demand, and drive growth, it’s that they can help define the rules of the game.

The Rise of Agentic Commerce

Most retailers and brands I speak with have not started planning for Agentic Commerce. Which is a problem, because the shift is already happening. LLMs like Perplexity, who are kickstarting the agentic commerce evolution, are already valued at over $1 billion. This is not something theoretical on the edge of innovation labs. It is happening in the tools and platforms your customers are already using every day.

Agentic Commerce is the most significant disruption to the eCommerce funnel since Google. It is being driven by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity that now serve as starting points for product discovery. And increasingly, they will also become the endpoints for conversion.

The longer the industry delays adapting to this reality, the more it risks losing not just visibility, but ownership of the customer relationship altogether.

What Agentic Commerce Really Means

Agentic Commerce refers to digital shopping experiences in which autonomous AI agents (powered by LLMs like ChatGPT or Perplexity) act on behalf of consumers to handle product research, comparison, and purchasing.

In short, the transaction is “informed by humans, bought by agents.” The buyer is no longer always human.\

Here is a real-world example. A consumer asks ChatGPT:

“I need to replace the water filter in my Whirlpool fridge. Find compatible options that have strong reviews and can be delivered by Friday.”

Today, the LLM can surface results and link to product pages. And in some cases, like with Perplexity, can complete the shopping journey at the point of search.

But very soon, the agent across all LLMs, not just Perplexity, will not only research and filter products but also complete the purchase directly through embedded commerce integrations. The consumer may never visit a retailer’s site.

This new mode of commerce favors systems that can deliver structured product data, API-accessible inventory, fulfillment metadata, and real-time pricing. It deprioritizes traditional marketing touchpoints like website UX, lifestyle imagery, and branded messaging. In this new world, logic and data beat creativity and design.

This new mode of commerce is fundamentally different from what retailers are doing today. Appeasing agentic commerce requires structured product content that is optimized for answering questions. Retailers will need specialized tooling in the form of an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to act as a trusted source for how AI models interact with your products, inventory availability, and pricing.

Lucky enough for a lot of our clients, this simply requires direct integrations to your eCommerce systems for real-time order processing and payment capture, something that Logicbroker already handles.

Retailers Are Already Losing Visibility

Retailers are feeling the effects of Agentic Commerce, even if they do not yet recognize the source.

Recent trends show that:

• Search-driven traffic is declining, especially among younger demographics. A 2024 study by Kantar and Similarweb found that 51% of Gen Z consumers now start product research in LLM platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini, bypassing Google and traditional retailer entry points.
• Google AI Overviews reduce the need to click into websites, surfacing summarized product information directly in the search results. This is already cutting into traffic for eCommerce brands relying on SEO.
• LLMs like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini are rapidly integrating commerce layers, with native shopping functionality expected to scale in the next 12 to 18 months. Reuters is predicting that LLM agents will make up 25% of eCommerce by 2030 totaling nearly $500 billion in sales each year. These platforms aim to keep users within the assistant environment for both discovery and purchase.

Meanwhile, brands are already losing access to key consumer signals.

When agents perform product comparisons, select a vendor, and finalize a transaction within the LLM’s interface, your systems may never receive the session data, the behavioral cues, or even the opportunity to cross-sell or retarget.

This is not a loss of traffic. It is a loss of customer insights and data.

Why Optimizing for a Single Platform Is a Strategic Mistake

On the flip side of this discussion, I’ve heard of many brands that are waiting to see which platform will “win.” Will it be OpenAI? Perplexity? Anthropic? Someone else?

Frankly, this is the wrong approach.

Consumers are already using a variety of tools depending on context. In a single week, a shopper might use Perplexity to research, ChatGPT to make a recommendation, and CoPilot to complete a task through a desktop assistant. They may also interact with retail-focused agents embedded in smart devices or shopping apps.

The market is fragmenting, not consolidating. Betting on one platform means missing the others. That is why the future requires a one-to-many infrastructure strategy.

Research by Grid Dynamics shows that over 60% of commerce platforms are exploring multi-agent integrations by 2026. The brands that thrive will have API-native systems, modular commerce architecture, and fulfillment logic that is interpretable by agents across surfaces.

Even Logicbroker supports this kind of future-ready structure. Our platform enables B2B and B2C retailers to expose product and order data through Model Context Protocol Servers (MCPs) in ways that agents can understand, use, and act on. It makes the ecosystem interoperable, and it ensures that your offers are represented across the full spectrum of discovery and decision-making.

How Agentic Commerce Is Already Changing Consumer Behavior

This isn’t just about technology. It is about what consumers are choosing to do.

A recent survey by TechRadar found that while only 34% of Americans currently trust AI to make purchases on their behalf, adoption is surging among younger consumers and in routine buying categories. In fact, more than 70% of Gen Z respondents said they are willing to outsource product research to an AI assistant if it saves time and reduces complexity.

Think about this in practical terms:

• Emotional, brand-driven purchases (like apparel or luxury items) may remain human-led.
• Repetitive, utility-driven purchases (like vitamins, filters, paper towels, office supplies) will increasingly be agent-driven.
• Research-intensive purchases (like electronics, supplements, or home improvement products) are already moving toward agent mediation.

AI agents reduce cognitive load. They eliminate scroll fatigue. They return results in seconds and filter based on the shopper’s true intent, not just keyword matching. Over time, this becomes habit. And once consumers adopt this behavior, very few will return to browsing fifteen tabs or reading twenty product descriptions.

What eCommerce Leaders Must Do Today

This shift is not something you can prepare for in a year. The groundwork needs to begin now.

Here is what executives should prioritize:

1. Reorganize product catalogs into structured, machine-readable formats. Descriptions, attributes, specs, and pricing must be accessible via clean APIs, not hidden in unstructured CMS blocks.
2. Expose fulfillment and inventory data in real time. Agents will deprioritize sellers who cannot confirm availability and delivery timelines at the moment of query.
3. Design your commerce architecture for interoperability. This means preparing for tokenized checkout and trust protocols that will define the next generation of transactions.
4. Monitor agent activity and refine based on agent-facing performance metrics. Traditional analytics like bounce rate and cart abandonment are no longer sufficient. You need insight into how agents are consuming, evaluating, and acting on your data.

Research from Rierino shows that early adopters of agentic frameworks are already seeing 6–10% increases in revenue and up to 40% improvement in order efficiency.

Build for the Future, Not the Funnel

Agentic Commerce is not a trend. It is a tectonic shift in how people shop. And like all tectonic shifts, it happens gradually, then suddenly.

If your strategy is still built around optimizing conversion rates through A/B tested banners and button colors, you are solving for a world that is disappearing. The new world is conversational. It is API-first. It is mediated by agents that optimize for relevance, availability, and logic, not emotion.

You do not need to throw out your playbook. But you do need to write a new chapter. Start with infrastructure. Expand your thinking. Prepare your products and systems for a world where your customer might not be a person, but a machine acting on that person’s behalf.

About Logicbroker

Logicbroker is an enterprise dropship and marketplace platform that seamlessly connects trading partners, enabling B2C retailers and brands, as well as B2B suppliers and distributors, to scale their digital commerce operations with ease. Powering billions in GMV, Logicbroker provides a robust API-driven infrastructure that streamlines product catalog management, order fulfillment, and reporting. Trusted by industry leaders including Samsung, Walgreens, Victoria’s Secret, Ace Hardware, and HD Supply, Logicbroker brings together best-in-class technology with deep domain expertise and a true spirit of partnership to empower businesses to unlock new revenue potential, elevate customer experiences, and drive operational excellence.