A man uses a computer, receiving an Agentforce recommendation for Alpine Group Green Tea GoBar.

What Is Agentic Commerce?

Agentic commerce uses AI to act on behalf of users or businesses. AI agents for ecommerce can make personalized recommendations, manage inventory, and interact with customers. They aim to enhance user experience and boost operational efficiency.

Today, we’re already used to ‘predictive AI’ – which analyzes data to provide recommendations, forecasts and insights–and ‘generative AI,’ which learns from data and uses patterns to seamlessly generate text, images, music and code. Agents go far beyond this. They can perform tasks independently, make decisions and even negotiate with other agents on our behalf. And these new AI agents are easy to build and deploy, unlocking massive capacity.

Marc Benioff
CEO, Salesforce
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How can merchandising teams use AI agents?

Consider all the information an ecommerce merchandising or marketing team would need to uncover to get started: Sales performance for specific products and categories. Marketing engagement performance to determine the success of previous campaigns. Customer data like order history, preferences, and product searches. Gathering this information could take days — sometimes even weeks.

With agents, it can be done in an instant. A merchandiser could simply build an agent to uncover these metrics and datapoints on a routine basis, and suggest personalized promotions for specific customer segments. For example, an apparel merchandiser might build an agent using this prompt: “Suggest weekly promotions to help us sell the three lowest-performing items in each category across our website.” Ultimately, agents help you boost sales and simplify marketing with auto-generated, personalized promotions based on real-time business insights.

Image of an agentic commerce tool suggesting a promotion to increase sales of low-performing stock.

Boost conversions with AI-powered data analysis. Merchandisers gain insight into shopper behavior and top-selling products, discovering what shoppers often buy together. They can use AI to take action to improve store performance, grow customer lifetime value, and achieve business goals.

Screenshot of an agentic commerce tool displaying an insights dashboard.

Quickly and reliably create copy for product listings based on a deep understanding of your inventory. Agents can also update and refresh descriptions based on customer reviews of specific products, helping you proactively address questions and concerns before customers make a purchase. For example, agents can include unique details such as, “A majority of customers say this shirt runs small. If you’re in-between sizes, it’s best to size up!”

Screenshot of an agentic commerce tool assisting with generative product descriptions
Image of an agentic commerce tool suggesting a promotion to increase sales of low-performing stock.
Screenshot of an agentic commerce tool displaying an insights dashboard.
Screenshot of an agentic commerce tool assisting with generative product descriptions

Agentic commerce FAQs

Agentic commerce refers to the use of autonomous AI agents that can act on behalf of customers or businesses to perform complex tasks, such as finding products, negotiating, or managing purchases.

Traditional AI often assists (e.g., chatbots, recommendations), while agentic AI has the autonomy to initiate and complete multi-step tasks independently, learning and adapting over time.

Consumers benefit from highly personalized, proactive assistance, time savings, optimized purchase decisions, and a frictionless shopping experience with minimal effort.

Businesses can use agentic AI to automate customer service, personalize product discovery, manage supply chain logistics, optimize pricing, and enhance fraud detection.

It relies on advanced AI, machine learning, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and sophisticated decision-making algorithms.

Ethical concerns include data privacy, transparency of AI actions, potential for bias in autonomous decisions, and accountability for agent behaviors.

Agentic commerce is expected to revolutionize online shopping, moving towards more intelligent, proactive, and individualized digital interactions that anticipate user needs.