Agentic Commerce: Own the Customer or Become Invisible

Agentic commerce — where an AI agent researches, decides on, or completes a purchase on your behalf — is arriving several times faster than e-commerce did.

Bain and McKinsey put it at 15–25% of US e-commerce, and up to a trillion dollars of orchestrated US retail revenue, by 2030: a channel share the web took twenty-five years to reach, compressed into about five.

This episode maps who's building it — OpenAI and Google fighting for the front door, Amazon walling its garden, Walmart arming its own agent — and why the scarce resource isn't the best AI but control of the customer at the moment of purchase.

We dig into the evidence that retailers can win this: shoppers trust a store's own agent about three times more than a third-party one, Walmart's Sparky lifts baskets by a third, OpenAI has already retreated from in-chat checkout, and in August 2026 an appeals court ruled platforms can't wall out the agents customers send.

Then the practical part: the no-regret moves a retailer should make now — real-time machine-readable feeds, a transactable checkout, a first-party agent, and keeping the customer relationship — versus the platform-specific bets worth deferring until the dust settles.

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