The shift to agentic commerce and its impact on the next decade of ecommerce

Mark Beresford, Director of Edgar, Dunn & Company, on the rise of agentic commerce and how autonomous AI agents will reshape the next decade of ecommerce.

Imagine your favourite shopping assistant that not only suggests what to buy, but buys it for you, negotiating the best price, checking delivery windows, and avoiding any fraudulent behaviour, all while you sleep or in a meeting at work. The next retail revolution won’t come from a storefront or an app – it will arrive as software that shops on your behalf, turning discovery, comparison, and checkout into an invisible background service. Big brands and merchants that treat AI as a new sales channel will lose out; those that treat AI as a customer will win, because agentic commerce – an emerging ecommerce model – will pass the buying power to autonomous AI agents, not humans.

Grocery to luxury

It was not until the late 1990s that grocery ecommerce saw massive investment, dominated by two different business models (i) the pure-play ecommerce businesses, such as Webvan and Peapod, and (ii) the established bricks-and-mortar supermarkets, who created their own home-delivery divisions to address consumer demand. Enter the era of agentic grocery shopping. In the last 30-odd years, ecommerce grocery shopping has evolved, but the core customer journey has remained largely unchanged, until now. ‘Agentic’ grocery shopping is expected to shift from active searching, that is, a consumer browsing apps or websites, to autonomous delegation where an AI agent makes decisions on behalf of the consumer. Grocery shopping is highly repetitive and largely functional, making it well suited to automation. As such, many consider it one of the ‘ideal’ retail segments for the rapid adoption of agentic commerce.

In practice, this could shift part of grocery shopping from a manual chore to a more ‘ambient service’ that happens in the background. Unlike fashion apparel or consumer electronics, groceries involve low decision-making costs, short purchase cycles, and the added complexity that many items have an expiration date. An AI agent that can learn a household’s consumption patterns and auto-orders the right quantity at the right time could deliver meaningful convenience for many households, even though adoption may be more gradual for categories where preferences, freshness, or brand loyalty play a stronger role. 

Soon the consumer’s AI agent could act upon the following request: ‘Restock my pantry with organic, low-sodium staples – prioritise eco-friendly packaging, stay under EUR 150, and deliver this Friday from 3pm to 6pm’. This may first appear a complex request, but AI agents can deal with this now. The leading supermarkets are investing billions of dollars to support these types of AI queries. 

A conversation with a luxury brand six months ago would have resulted in the conclusion that agentic commerce is not on the agenda. The biggest threat to luxury brands and luxury retailers was the ‘tone of voice’ or potential for ‘brand dilution’. How would AI agents understand the product, its provenance, and its workmanship? However, based on conversations only one month ago, this viewpoint has taken a U-turn. There are specific use cases in luxury where agentic commerce would be perfect. Take design collaborations – for example, Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with the Japanese contemporary artist, Takashi Murakami. When these design collaborations go on sale for a limited period, the market demand is off the scale. This is where an AI shopping agent could wait in line and ‘purchase a Louis Vuitton Takashi Murakami handbag given a budget of USD 6,000’. Luxury brands will treat agentic commerce as both an opportunity and a threat. They will adopt it where it protects or amplifies exclusivity, and resist or limit it where it risks dilution of brand meaning. 

Market size

The headline news from the research Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) have conducted is that agentic commerce is not going to bring incremental revenue for merchants, it marks a shift in consumer behaviour. Recent data from Google has shown that 42% of consumers have used at least one AI tool to shop within the past month. Also, according to Google, 56% of consumers use AI specifically to compare prices and find deals and 47% use AI to summarize product reviews before deciding to buy. EDC believe North America and APAC will be the early adaptors of agentic commerce – whereas Europe will be following quickly behind as soon as the challenges with strong customer authentication (SCA) and other regulatory frameworks are addressed.

Based on EDC research, by 2030, 29% of global consumer ecommerce will be agentic commerce – that is, where AI agents acting on behalf of consumers will complete a purchase transaction. As of today, ‘human in the loop’ is standard practice during these ‘agentic’ transactions, but EDC believe within the next six months fully autonomous agentic commerce will emerge. A-commerce will be a subset of ecommerce. Agentic commerce is expected to grow at around 185% CAGR 2026 to 2030, but then slow and gradually align itself with ecommerce growth. 

It has been a long journey, of around 20-25 years, for ecommerce to establish itself as a mainstream sales channel. Today we are at a significant watershed in terms of the acceptance and processing of digital payments with the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies. This is the dawn of agentic commerce.

Event planning

Ticket sales for high‑demand events – such as concerts by Taylor Swift, Coldplay, or Oasis, festival events such as Glastonbury, and the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics – use layered, controlled processes combining pre‑sales, lotteries, ballots, verified queues, and seat allocations. All of this is intended to manage huge demand, prevent AI bots, fraudulent activities, and secondary ticket sales, and to preserve fairness and venue policy. This has resulted in a ticket booking process that is a high-stress, highly manual, form filling, and time-consuming activity for many consumers. You can apply for a mortgage quicker than you can buy 2026 World Cup tickets for your favourite football team. 

Based on EDC research, event ticketing in the UK by 2028 will be worth GBP 6.5 billion. As a result of COVID-19, most of these sales will involve an end-to-end digital process, from search to payment to ticketing. The EDC forecast has found that around 37% of sales is expected to go through AI agents by 2028 – driven by larger venues, big events such as the World Cup, and the need to address unmet consumer demand. 

Ticketmaster and SeatGeek have recently reached deals to appear in Google’s Agentic AI search to help in event discovery. The 2026 World Cup is expected to be the first World Cup where agentic commerce traffic will represent a significant proportion of total sales. Unfortunately, it is also expected to be a breeding ground for fraudulent ticket sales where scammers are using AI.

Travel

Agentic commerce is poised to bring profound changes to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) for leisure and business travel, which will fundamentally reshape both the user experience and operating models. AI agents are expected to increasingly act on behalf of travellers, autonomously searching, comparing, and booking hotels, flights, and packages using natural conversation rather than keywords or web navigation. This shift will reduce the relevance of traditional checkout pages, moving transactions into conversational interfaces, and may erode the competitive edge of OTAs that rely on web design or traditional sales funnel optimisation. 

The OTA’s agility in responding to this market demand – from ‘off-surface’ or outside AI agents searching and potentially booking using the OTA’s inventory – will be a decisive factor. Having a distribution and payment strategy that considers the potential impact of agentic commerce will be essential to mitigate the risks of becoming yet another inventory aggregator or of being bypassed entirely. OTAs that are trusted and have a large traveller base, built on loyalty programmes or by meeting travellers’ payment expectations, will have a stronger position against these risks.

The travel industry is one of the verticals most accustomed to complex purchasing and payment flows, as intermediaries like OTAs have the option to be the Merchant of Record (MoR). Additionally, travel suppliers are already familiar with the distinction between reseller and pass-through models. Introducing agentic commerce therefore adds yet another layer of complexity to an already intricate ecosystem. However, for other verticals, where the payment processes are more straightforward, the introduction of agentic commerce will also bring similar complexities depending on who performs the MoR role.

From the OTAs’ perspective, there are a lot of opportunities and risks with the rise of agentic commerce. It is important to keep in mind that the transformation will be led by traveller behaviour, as travellers will be the ones choosing where to search and pay for their travel bookings. It is essential for OTAs to define their future content distribution and payment strategy thinking of the implications of an agentic commerce ecosystem in terms of risks and costs, but also in terms of potential business expansion and revenue creation.

What’s next?

AI and agentic commerce will have widespread implications for all types of merchants. This article barely scratches the surface of the potential impact on grocery retailing, luxury brand merchants, event ticket distribution, and OTAs. There are very few retail segments and ecommerce businesses that will not feel the impact of AI and agentic commerce.

While agentic commerce promises unparalleled efficiency, its realisation is hindered by a complex landscape of hurdles to overcome. The transition demands a rigorous overhaul of trust and security frameworks, as the shift from human-led to autonomous decision-making creates new vulnerabilities and sophisticated vectors for AI-driven fraud. Furthermore, the inevitable disruption of traditional business models forces a total reassessment of value capture. When software algorithms aim to replace human consumers in the decision-making loop, existing marketing, product branding, and sales paradigms become out-of-date. Navigating this watershed moment demands more than just technical innovation – it requires the creation of entirely new commercial guardrails and security standards to ensure these autonomous agents remain secure, accountable, and aligned with human interests.

Reflecting on the past two decades, we can see that the transition of ecommerce from a niche experiment to a mainstream pillar of global consumer retail commerce has been a steady, 20 to 25-year evolution. Today, we have reached a pivotal turning point. The convergence of artificial intelligence and digital payment processing marks a shift from reactive transactions to active participation. This transition signals the dawn of agentic commerce, where technology no longer just facilitates a sale, but actively manages and executes the commercial experience.

About the author

Mark Beresford is a Director at Edgar, Dunn & Company and has over 25 years of strategic consulting experience in the payments sector. He is responsible for the company’s retailer and merchant payments practice, working with omnichannel merchants and payment service providers across the globe.

 

About Edgar, Dunn & Company

Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) is an independent global payments consultancy. The company is widely regarded as a trusted adviser, providing a full range of strategy consulting services, expertise, and market insights. EDC’s expertise includes M&A due diligence, legal and regulatory support across the payment ecosystem, fintech, mobile payments, digitalisation of retail and corporate payments, and financial services.