Forget about classic webshop design and one-dimensional customer journeys. Agentic Shopping is about to transform e-commerce as we know it. Think AI agents buying for you, transactions happening right inside Google and ChatGPT, and new touchpoints for inspiration along the way. The future of shopping will be personal, proactive—and a bit unsettling for anyone who’s spent years perfecting the old way of doing e-commerce.
The New Frontier of E-commerce: AI with Real Agency
If you still think the future of e-commerce is about faster websites and better-looking banners, it’s time to update your browser. The future is AI-powered, and AI is taking a bigger role in how customers shop.
Agentic Shopping is the emerging trend where users let AI agents search, compare, and even make purchases for them. We’ve mentioned it before - but this time, it’s getting real.
OpenAI, Amazon, and especially Google are leading the charge. At Google I/O, the company unveiled AI Mode for Shopping and Search, giving every user a personal AI shopper that suggests products based on behavior, preferences, and past purchases. Add Google Pay, and your AI can handle the full checkout for you.
Soon, you’ll even be able to buy directly inside Google - no need to visit Zalando, Sport24, Matas, or anywhere else. Your AI agent will do the legwork.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has added shopping-focused search in ChatGPT, Perplexity has been doing it since late 2024, and Amazon and Walmart are building AI tools that keep customers within their own universes. To top it off, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are developing services to support AI-driven payments and agentic commerce.
It’s a lot to take in—but the message is clear: e-commerce is about to change dramatically.
Consumers will shop differently, and brands must rethink their journeys to serve both people and AI.
Because honestly—what’s the role of a webshop if your customers never visit it anymore?
Weird thought, right? More on that soon.
Agentic Shopping in Action
The future of e-commerce will consist of an ecosystem of AI agents—working together, communicating seamlessly, and supporting both sides of the shopping experience: smooth operations for businesses and frictionless journeys for customers.
Imagine a multi-agent setup inside your webshop:
- One agent identifies customer needs based on past interactions
- Another generates personalized product descriptions in real time
- A third optimizes pricing using competitor data and stock levels
- While a fourth handles return flows for customers who change their minds.
These aren’t distant ideas. They’re the kinds of pilot projects already being tested in the market today.
On the end-user side, picture an AI agent that knows when your daughter’s birthday is, remembers what she got last year, and suggests the perfect gift based on her current interests. You simply choose your favorite suggestion, delivered right in Google or ChatGPT, while the AI agent compares prices, checks stock, and places the order using your Visa card.
That’s agentic shopping in practice: An intelligent network of cooperating agents creating lightning-fast, contextual, and personalized shopping experiences.
No endless site-hopping, no comparing prices across 17 tabs. Just one smart, connected flow from intent to purchase.
Composable Commerce: Building an Ecosystem of Intelligent AI Agents
Supporting agentic shopping requires the right architecture, and companies already working with composable commerce and MACH principles are ahead of the curve. Their strength lies in modularity and flexibility.
In practical terms, this means combining your existing microservices, like product data, pricing, inventory, customer management, and checkout, into a single Product Business Capability (PBC). This PBC gives AI agents structured, direct access to the data they need through APIs that are machine-readable and human-friendly.
A modular setup also makes it easier to build an MCP server (Model Context Protocol), the new standard enabling AI agents to talk directly to business systems and pull real-time product, price, and stock data. In a composable setup, the MCP server can act as a standalone PBC, orchestrating data access across your different services.
That means third parties such as Google, OpenAI, or payment providers can handle the checkout process, while your organization focuses on providing clean data and robust capabilities through your composable stack.
Why You Can't Afford to Wait
For both e-commerce businesses and consumers, agentic shopping opens up a world of new opportunities.
Companies that learn to deploy AI agents effectively are likely to gain a clear competitive edge in the future of commerce. One where major players like Google, OpenAI, and Amazon will play an even larger role in the customer journey than they already do.
That also means we, as e-commercers, need to rethink the customer journey and user experience for both humans and their AI agents. SEO will no longer just be about being visible to Google, it’s about being discoverable to AI agents, and ensuring they find the right information. Your product pages must increasingly be machine-readable as well as human-readable, because what makes sense to a person isn’t always what an AI understands.
Now is the time to define the role AI agents will play in your e-commerce business.
To navigate this shift, you’ll need technical readiness: Structured data, API-friendly systems, and semantically rich product feeds. Humans can decode a beautiful product description; AI agents need clear attributes, precise specifications, and real-time data to make the right choices on behalf of their users. This is exactly where MACH and composable commerce offer a technological advantage.
Most people assumed these developments were years away. But with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, Amazon, Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others moving at the same time, one thing is certain: Now’s the moment to decide how AI agents fit into your e-commerce strategy.
Looking Ahead: Do You Still Need a Webshop?
Agentic shopping forces e-commerce companies to think differently. What happens when the customer journey begins with an AI agent instead of a human? How do we build trust in automated purchase decisions? And how do we make sure our brand story still shines through when it’s told by a machine, not a marketer?
For many in e-commerce, it’s an unsettling thought. If customers never visit your webshop but shop directly through Google or ChatGPT, what happens to your brand visibility? How do you stand out in a search result shaped by algorithms rather than design? And what about all those first-party data strategies? Are they still relevant if transactions move elsewhere?
Big questions. Few clear answers. At least for now. But at Vertica, we’re convinced that the ability to understand and collaborate with machine decision-makers will become one of the defining competitive advantages in the next era of e-commerce.
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