Commerce has always evolved in clear waves: In the 90s, consumers started shopping online. In the 2000s, ecommerce moved to the cloud. The 2010s ushered in mobile and social shopping. And now, we’re at the beginning of a new paradigm shift toward agentic commerce. The agentic era is poised to completely change how businesses operate and grow, and how consumers interact.
To succeed in the future of commerce, businesses will need to fundamentally rethink how they operate, make decisions, and use technology. This shift is all about building systems and cultures that are adaptable, data-driven, and future-ready. Here’s everything you need to know about how to strategize and stay ahead of the curve.
How to make the shift from a legacy businesses to an agentic enterprise
Ecommerce channels are changing, and traditional strategies are no longer enough. Now, businesses need to optimize not only for consumer experience, but for machine interpretation. With the rise of agentic commerce, intelligent AI agents are taking a more active role in the buying process, acting on behalf of users to evaluate options, compare value, and even complete transactions.
As agents become an increasingly important factor in product discoverability, customer service, and consumer choice, success will depend on strategies that enable agentic experiences: unified data, streamlined tech stacks, and interoperability.
Unify data to build a solid foundation for agentic commerce
AI agents rely on clean, consistent, and structured information to make informed decisions on behalf of both business users and consumers. When product, pricing, inventory, fulfillment, and customer experience data are fragmented across systems or presented in inconsistent formats, agents struggle to accurately interpret offerings, assess value, or communicate reliably. When your business data is unified across commerce, marketing, and service into a single, consistent, and structured format, it can be activated quickly by both humans and AI agents.
Consolidate and streamline your tech stack
Many legacy systems are a patchwork of siloed tools, slow to integrate and expensive to maintain. Agentic enterprises need consolidated, cloud-native, and API-first platforms that simplify the stack and eliminate redundancy. This consolidation boosts operational efficiency, speeds up innovation, and lowers technical debt. The future of commerce isn’t about adding more tech; it’s about choosing interoperable systems that work in sync and scale easily.
Prioritize Interoperability
Traditional businesses often build heavily customized systems that are hard to update and integrate. The future of commerce demands modular, interoperable technologies that can plug and play across functions and partners. Businesses should adopt standards-based architectures, invest in open APIs, and choose vendors committed to ecosystem thinking. Interoperability fuels speed, agility, and innovation, and it’s essential in ecosystems where partners, platforms, and customers are co-creators.
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How will the customer experience change in the future of commerce?
AI-assisted shopping is still in its early stages, but a growing number of consumers report using AI agents for product discovery, purchasing, and customer service. Compared to baby boomers, millennials and Gen Z are much more likely to infuse AI in their shopping journeys, suggesting that agentic commerce will gain more momentum as these generations’ purchasing power increases.
Soon, shopping will be seen as a conversation, not just a transaction. For the last twenty years, “digital transformation” meant putting your store online. In the future of commerce, profitable growth won’t come from simply maintaining an ecommerce site; it will come from making every single moment — from discovery to purchase to service — agentic. Here’s what that means for the customer experience.
Conversational product discovery: Agentic commerce will fundamentally reshape product discovery by shifting it from passive browsing and search to active, intent-driven conversations handled by intelligent agents. Instead of getting lost scrolling through pages, shoppers will get tailored assistance, helping them find the right products faster.
Intuitive, easy product exploration: With AI agents, product exploration shifts from a manual, often overwhelming process into a more streamlined, guided, and efficient experience. That’s because AI agents understand user preferences, constraints, and context, and they can curate highly personalized, relevant assistance. For example, How does a pair of jeans actually fit on someone with my exact measurements? Does this refrigerator use a linear or inverter compressor, and how does that affect noise level and efficiency?
In the past, shoppers had to toggle between tabs, search forums, and call service reps to get hyper-specific answers that would inform their purchase decisions. Now, they can simply chat with an AI agent trained on detailed product information, and get answers immediately.
Conversions driven by conversation: With integrated express payments, shoppers can complete their purchase with a single click — right in the chat, on any channel they prefer. No need for a clunky experience that involves site navigation and multiple screens. This is the new standard for an agentic shopping experience. A smooth customer journey, entirely driven by a chat with an AI agent, opens the door to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
Smooth transitions between online to offline experiences: While agentic commerce experiences proliferate, in-store shopping is still a valuable part of the customer journey. In fact, 41% of purchases are expected to take place in physical stores in 2026. AI agents might help consumers research, compare, or reserve products online, but the final step of trying on, picking up, and purchasing often happens in physical stores. A seamless handoff between online and offline will ensure the user journey doesn’t break when moving from screen to store.
Unified commerce will be a foundational element of success
Your ecommerce capabilities and customer experience are only as good as the platforms you build and implement them on. Cohesive online to offline shopping journeys and successful, impactful AI depends on the foundation you lay with the rest of your ecommerce tech stack. That’s exactly why more businesses are turning to unified commerce.
Unified commerce makes consistent customer experiences across online, in-store, and mobile channels possible. It connects digital commerce, point of sale, and order management on one platform. When these critical systems are all connected, you can drive consistent engagement and seamless transactions on any channel — without bolting on costly, siloed tools.
The business outcomes of implementing unified commerce? Data consistency and centralization. Agility and operational efficiency. Better customer experiences. And that’s the critical foundation for impactful agentic commerce. When these areas of your business are unified, it makes agentic AI implementations faster, easier, and more effective.
Are you ready for the agentic era?
The landscape is changing fast and competition is heating up, but companies with the right tools and strategies will find success in the future of commerce. As you plan for 2026, focus on implementing strategies that will help you deliver on rising customer expectations, fast. Increasingly, that means unifying commerce with the rest of your business, leveraging AI and automation, and adopting interoperable architectures. The future of commerce belongs to organizations that can move fast, iterate, and innovate.
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