Agentic Commerce: The Next Big Shift in Retail

Kunal Puri:

I want to take a few minutes today to talk about what I believe is the most important trend in the world of today and for the next 18 months. As many of you would have guessed, I'm talking about agentic commerce. I believe agentic commerce is going to change the way consumers engage with brands in a variety of ways. For example, consumers will now be able to use their personal shopping assistance and request saying, find me a dinner jacket in white under $200. The buyer agent or the personal shopping assistant will now have the flexibility to pick whether to shop Polo Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Aritzia, Anthropologie or any other brand that the consumer has been shopping in the past. What this means is the brands no longer have the ability to now influence the shopping behavior either through cross-sells or upsells or even whether the consumer's buying agent actually comes to their site. The other impact in this space that we expect to see is on marketplaces who have been deriving certain amount of revenue from the retail media networks. Fundamentally, that entire business model will have to dramatically change to support the needs of these personalized shopping agents. Broadly, what we expect to see is that consumers will depend more and more on the shopping agents. The shopping agents in turn will engage with these brands.

The brands will need to create their own seller agents, as we call them, to be able to engage with these personalized shopping assistants from the buyers or the consumers, to be able to do the cross-sell, the upsell, and to be able to control the sale the way they have been doing when a consumer walks into the store today. So it's interesting times ahead. We clearly expect to see a lot more happen in this space, and look forward to engaging with you on this conversation.