“Hey Alexa: add some eggs, cage-free, from my favorite brand list to my grocery order for the week.”
“Sure. I’ve added a dozen New England Cage-Free Premium Eggs to your list. Should I complete the purchase now and have it delivered within the next day?”
Convenient for consumers. A nightmare for brands. The dialogue above outlines the personalization that agentic buying might offer the consumer. Swap in Sparky, Pixie, Siri, AskAI, or another updated agentic bot to replace an agentic experience for Alexa above, and you’ll see the expanse of options. The outcome is the same, however, when you see the $18.99 price tag discounting fees and tips for the service. Merchants feel control slipping away with the higher price tag, while their customer relationship is whittled away by big tech.
Can consumers blindly trust agents to choose?
The benefits to consumers can drive lower prices and even price negotiation by adding “at the lowest price please” in the prompt to Alexa. However, depending on the ownership of the tech, it may require some time to settle in. What is lost is consumer choice. In the West, a critical part of shopping is the consumer’s independent choice. But in the case of agentic buying, the consumer delegates part (or all) of this capability to their partner agent. They are unable to see options, the decision-making process, or even the instructions the user may have provided initially.
Current trends do not suggest automatic acceptance of the process for the consumer. IDC’s 2026 worldwide retail consumer sentiment study shows there’s support for digital assistants. 84.7% of consumers were ready to use digital assistants and chatbots when shopping. While this may sound like a promising endorsement of agentic commerce, the agentic shift is still early. Only 30.7% are using AI chat tools such as ChatGPT to discover or research products. The trust factor has not yet been fully met for the stages of the agentic lifecycle, delaying market adoption of a customer-facing agentic-driven business model. The next version of commerce will require mastering site personalization for the agentic buyer and human shopper, each with their own view of how to buy. What this means for agentic experiences is that it’s still not ready for prime time.
A sucker punch for merchants
For the merchant side (in most cases, retailers), agentic buying is ruthless. There is an implicit undermining of brand value and a race to the bottom of price. Miniscule margins for retailers would shrink even further to the point of a surefire loss. Some retailers are considering agentic buying a new channel but others consider it an extension of eCommerce.
Whether a new channel or a just the next evolutionary step in eCommerce, the silver lining for merchants is that agentic buying is primarily affecting the 15-20% of eCommerce sales rather than the entire retail business. This is a myopic view when one considers omnichannel trends, digital discovery, and social media and the potential for each to become potential conduits for agentic transactions. The merchant is impacted by revising brand and emotional influence factors with a logical intermediary that replaces the merchant-consumer relationship. Merchants are loath to support such efforts as it results in inevitable loss of control across merchants’ target markets. At best, agentic buying is a lopsided partnership where retailers are exploited through incurring most of the risk and a new cost burden when engaging the consumer. At worst, agentic buying hollows out the retailer’s business model to the point of eliminating a merchant’s market presence.
Consumers are already in the discovery lifeboats
The movement from keyword search to agentic discovery is already underway, fueled by massive theft of merchant IP and product data and the rapidly eroding consumer trust search engines accrued. The IDC Agentic Commerce: Buyer Lifecycle Opportunity Analysis report highlights an eventual full conversion to agentic discovery within a year. Consumers will have the ability to make selections and choose better, with more informed choices, overcoming any trust issues with hallucinations or incorrect product information. Public adoption for discovery will eliminate some challenges on the merchant side. Alternatively, merchant reluctance to cooperate (or lack of understanding of how to engage) with agentic discovery tools will contribute to an uneven and rocky transition to agentic discovery.
The tech sharks are circling
The agentic buying move is like pulling the rug out from merchants. There’s a non-zero chance that agentic buying will negate countless hours of labor for the brands and merchants that spent years preparing carefully curated customer experiences, from shelf labeling to end-cap promotions. Most retailers will chalk this up to impacting just their non-store sales, but in an omnichannel world, the changed perspectives will hit the bottom line. Multiple tensions will impact the market including trust, disintermediation, control, transparency, and data ownership.
While the discovery stage of the lifecycle is an inevitability due to already existing customer adoption, maybe the next stages of purchasing, fulfillment and beyond as part of the buying lifecycle will take a different path. The merchants are certainly counting on it. The desperation persists as merchants clamor for clarity in the agentic AI world, stranded in the center with circling tech sharks peddling agentic tools and capabilities.
While merchants are trying to make sense of how agentic will affect not only their businesses, agentic tech companies are seeking out ways to divide and conquer well-known retail domains without the leg work of physically building stores, relying completely on the digital experience.
Perhaps that’s the AI answer after all.
Instead of: “Hey Alexa, how do we prevent these tech vendors from stealing our hard-earned customer brand value?”
Merchants may find themselves asking: “Hey Alexa, who’s the best lawyer that can boost monetary damages in a lawsuit against big tech? Are there any active class action lawsuits I can join that could potentially slow down the agentic commerce shift?”
The push and pull of agentic buying tech will continue to disrupt the current market norms and only those retailers who understand the forces at work will thrive.
Need to know how agentic commerce will affect your business? Explore the latest research reports, IDC Agentic Commerce: B2C Buyer Life Cycle Opportunity Analysis to learn more about the forces impacting agentic buying.