In agentic commerce the buyer no longer clicks through a storefront. They tell an assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini what they want ("running shoes under $120, wide fit, arrives by Friday"), and the agent reads structured product data across merchants, shortlists options, and moves toward checkout.
For merchants this flips discovery: agents don't see your hero images or popups — they read your llms.txt, product schema and feed. Being selected depends on machine-readable data, not persuasion. McKinsey projects $3–5 trillion in agent-orchestrated retail spend by 2030.
It's the transactional end of it. AI shopping includes browsing and recommendations; agentic commerce specifically means the agent takes actions — comparing and buying — not just answering.