Is Agentic Commerce a Thing?

Why It Matters

For businesses, the rise of multi‑agent, multimodal interactions promises improved personalization and new distribution channels but also raises integration, trust, and liability risks as expectations outpace capabilities.

Summary

Forrester analysts outline “agentic commerce” as nascent AI systems—composed of foundation models and task-specific agents—that can take actions to assist or conduct parts of the shopping journey, from discovery to, in rare cases, checkout. The firm distinguishes owned experiences (brand-controlled sites where agents currently aid product discovery) from non‑owned answer engines (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity) that enable cross‑site research and are beginning to collaborate with merchant agents; true end‑to‑end agentic transactions remain uncommon. For businesses, the rise of multi‑agent, multimodal interactions promises improved personalization and new distribution channels but also raises integration, trust, and liability risks as expectations outpace capabilities.