Industry Trends
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8 MIN READ
At NRF this year, AI dominated nearly every conversation, booth, and cab ride across the city. The question, “Are you ready for agentic commerce?” was plastered everywhere. A query that sounds confident, futuristic, and reassuring… until you actually stop to think about what it means. The truth is, most customers, brands, and even technology partners aren’t fully sure yet.
And that uncertainty? It feels familiar.
Remember the dot-com boom of the ‘90s? Back then, we didn’t fully understand what the internet was going to become, we just knew it was big. So we shoved it into everything. If your company name ended in “.com,” investors lined up, regardless of whether there was a clear business model behind it.
Internet companies at that time were like game show contestants in one of those phone booths filled with money. It didn’t matter what industry you were in, but if you had .com at the end, you were being handed bags of money.
Fast-forward to today, and the feeling around AI feels less like a boom and more like euphoria.
For the first time ever, AI companies captured over half of all global venture funding. OpenAI is approaching a valuation of close to half a trillion dollars, with the possibility that they may IPO at the $1 trillion mark later this year. Consumer interest has only buoyed this trend further. How many of us rely on AI daily in ways that feel mundane? Call summaries, automated notes, and scheduling support are just a few minor efficiencies that quietly free us up to be more human in our work.
While, like the internet, AI and the hype around it will eventually settle, change at this scale is destabilizing. It creates uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds anxiety, especially inside organizations.
There’s a well-known cognitive behavioral study called the Uncertainty Stress Study that helps explain why. Participants experienced the highest stress levels when there was a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock. Stress actually dropped when they were told there was a 100% chance. Why? Because certainty, even when unpleasant, is easier for humans to process.
AI is that shock.
A year ago, AI discussions at NRF left me uncomfortable because I was still stuck in that 50% zone. Today, I’m certain: AI will change how customers discover products, interact with brands, and complete transactions. That certainty doesn’t eliminate the challenge but it does make it easier to respond thoughtfully rather than reactively. And that’s where opportunity lives.
In commerce, we often talk about expected versus aspirational behavior.
Five years ago, expected meant responsive design, faster checkout, and basic personalization. Aspirational meant dynamic pricing, blended B2B/DTC experiences, subscription models, loyalty programs, and maybe a chatbot.
Now, those aspirational features are simply table stakes. And new expectations are forming just as quickly: self-service portals, channel parity across DTC, B2B, POS, and AI, and deeply integrated data experiences that work wherever the customer chooses to engage.
Agentic commerce turns tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot into de facto personal shoppers. The entire buying journey — product discovery, discounting, shipping options, subscriptions — happens inside a conversation.
While this is a systemic shock, it’s also a tremendous opportunity to be tactical first movers in building an agent storefront experience for your customers and capture more of that customer share sooner. And preparing for this all is simpler than you’d think.
For AI to represent your brand accurately, your product information needs to be structured, contextual, and machine-readable. We’re already seeing the shift from traditional SEO toward GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Instead of optimizing for keywords, brands must optimize for understanding.
That means:
A very simple way to achieve this all in one place is to leverage Shopify’s agentic storefront. Shopify has effectively denoted ‘AI’ as its fourth sales channel, joining the traditional online storefront, B2B, and POS sales channels.
A unique feature that Shopify just announced was an ‘Agentic’ Shopify plan which will allow both merchants on Shopify, as well as non-Shopify merchants, to list their products in AI catalogs. You can upload your product data in to Shopify, and then your products can appear in AI queries and be purchased right in the chat.
AI’s impact goes well beyond checkout.
AI is not a perfect science. It’s evolving quickly, and it won’t replace human judgment, creativity, or strategy. But it is here to stay. It may make us faster but the real advantage comes from how thoughtfully we decide to use it.
We believe early adopters will gain a significant advantage: greater visibility, more accurate recommendations, and a faster path to capturing demand as AI-driven commerce becomes mainstream.
Ready to take the leap? Download our infosheet to learn how to prepare your store for Agentic Commerce.
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