Agentic Commerce: Meet your new customers

Agentic commerce means AI does your shopping. Not “recommends”. Not “suggests”. Buys. You say: “Find me the best 75‑inch TV under £1,500, delivered by Friday.” The agent does the rest. Searches. Compares. Checks reviews. Applies discounts. Pays. The only human action is intent. "Find me this." Find me that."

What funnel?

No five‑stage journey. Just intent and order. If you’re in sales, that should grab your attention. Because the thing you need to influence is no longer a person. It’s the software that acts for that person.

Why this matters now

McKinsey reckons AI agents could control trillions of dollars in sales by 2030. That’s web‑and‑mobile‑level disruption money. And it’s already started.

Early agents live inside big platforms.

Users are getting lazy in a very specific way:“Let them do it.” Once people trust the agent for one purchase, they’ll trust it for the rest. So your competition changes. You’re not fighting for attention in a banner ad. You’re fighting for a slot in an AI’s shortlist.

The high ground

Look at what the platforms are doing. eBay bans third‑party “buy‑for‑me” bots. At the same time, it pushes its own AI shopping helper. That tells you everything.

They don’t hate agents. They hate other people’s agents. Marketplaces and big tech want to own the intermediary. Own the agent, own the customer.

Where does that leave you?

Trying to keep a direct relationship with someone who increasingly never shows up.Only their agent does. So the game becomes this: How do you sell to an algorithm obsessed with price, performance, and risk?

Awareness, consideration, purchase – all squashed into one decision step inside the agent. Remember, it walks through where the money goes first:

Retail. Travel. Subscriptions. B2B procurement.

Anywhere the choice is messy and repetitive, the agent will take over. It then looks at how business models shift. Pricing.Bundles. Loyalty. All get redesigned for AI that ‘learns’ how to provide lifetime value.

The new game: Winning over the agent

Making ‘Receptionist Gatekeepers’ look like Mary Poppins. When humans bought, you sold with stories and emotion. When agents buy, you sell with data and structure.

Your product feed becomes your pitch.

Clean attributes. Clear guarantees. Reliable stock and delivery data. If your information is vague, the agent ignores you. If your terms are fuzzy, the agent doesn’t take the risk.

So we are moving from human‑centric messaging to machine‑readable value. Sales enablement isn’t just decks and talk tracks any more. It’s schemas, SLAs, and performance history. We also look at trust and policy.

Rethinking the sales process

If the buyer is half human, half algorithm, your sales team has to be the same.

AI that understands ranking logic. AI for product and data teams. AI scraped SLAs.

You need governance, not just enthusiasm.

Getting ‘agent‑ready’

Make your catalogue agent‑friendly: Structured data. Consistent pricing. Clear constraints. Plug into agent ecosystems: Marketplaces. Search platforms. Enterprise procurement tools.

Perform a ‘double bubble’

Let agents handle the routine orders. Let humans handle edge cases, complex deals, and upsell. Think of it like this: The agent gets the standard order through the door. Your people grow it. Best of both worlds.

A simple plan for a sales in 2026

Run our ‘Agentic Agility’ audit. Where do agents already touch your funnel? (Yonk!) Where is your data a mess? Where are the quick wins?

Design your agentic channel strategy. Where do you embrace platform agents? Where do you build your own? How do you preserve any kind of direct customer relationship?

Pilot, measure, scale. Treat this like a three‑year test programme, not a gimmick.

And it ends with a picture of what “agentic‑first” looks like in three years’ time.

Orders start with a sentence to an AI, not a click on an ad. Some will complain it’s all too complicated. They’re right. It is complicated.

That’s why the smart cookies will make changes now.  The smartest cookies will book an ‘Agentic Agility’ audit with us – it’s free of course… steve@bemorecheetah.com