Full Webinar Transcription
All right, so let's go ahead and dive in. Today we're going to be talking about Agentic Commerce, the benefits and how to get started and is your store ready for Agentic Commerce. So my name is Cameron. I'm a project manager here at Minion Made. We're helping Shopify stores improve customer experience, streamline operations, and unlock growth opportunities through Shopify strategy, development, and optimization.
What We're Going to Cover Today
And here's what we're going to cover today. What is Agentic Commerce? Unpacking the core concept and implications of how it can help you with online retail, the market opportunity, understanding the potential for growth and disruption, how AI agents shop, the open protocols, why it matters for your store, and how to prepare and what is the future of agent commerce look like.
The Market Opportunity
So, this is a huge opportunity coming up in the industry. It's 3 to 5 trillion opportunity that's really going to change the way we think about commerce. Agentic commerce is a new model of e-commerce where AI agents shop on behalf of consumers. And so what does that actually look like? Researching products, comparing options and completing purchases autonomously. McKinsey estimates global agentic commerce opportunity could reach 3 to 5 trillion by 2030. And for businesses, this creates an urgent and new mandate to ensure that AI agents pick your product instead of competitors.
What Is Agentic Commerce?
It's an online shopping model where AI agents make decisions across the entire shopping journey from product discovery through checkout and post-purchase support with minimal human intervention. So this includes conversational commerce where chat bots are recommending based on features of the consumer and AI is helping you browse and then AI is also querying different brands and comparing ingredients and prices and picking the best options for you.
How AI Agents Shop Today
So AI engines are built on LLMs, large language models, now acting as shopping agents finding products and helping checkout mechanics. And so key platforms already live: Microsoft Copilot checkout, buying without leaving the conversation; Perplexity instant buy; Google AI mode; ChatGPT shopping. These are some of the AI agents starting to pop up in the industry.
And the open protocols powering the ecosystem include Agentic Commerce Protocol or ACP and Universal Commerce Protocol or UCP. And these are two different protocols. One launched by OpenAI and Stripe and the other co-developed by Shopify and Google. And Shopify also introduced Agentic Storefronts which is granting millions of merchants access to AI channels like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI mode all managed from the Shopify admin and that's that new app that launched in the sales channels which is really expected to increase 15-fold over 2025 with orders in terms of where you're going to be expecting those sales to come from.
Agentic AI versus Agentic Commerce
Agentic AI is more broadly thinking of AI systems that autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step tasks. Whereas, Agentic Commerce is really around buying and selling and it's the shopping journey specifically and how we think about product discovery, checkout, post-purchase support. And so, related terms there are going to be programmatic commerce, which is automated rule-based agent-to-agent transactions. And that's going to get into the world of ultimately AI commerce.
Why Agentic Commerce Matters for Your Store
Well, you can reach high intent shoppers. 64% of shoppers plan to use AI when making purchases. 84% ages 18 to 24 per Shopify's global holiday report. And then new channels with no extra burden. This is a way you can list your products once in a centralized catalog, kind of similar to Google, and syndicate across AI platforms. No new integrations or separate listings there. And you can reduce friction and boost conversions. Shoppers complete purchases inside a conversation using their stored credentials. And there's no account creation or re-entering payment information. So, it's really frictionless.
So, high intent shoppers are already using AI as well. There's a 64% use of AI to shop in the space and shoppers are likely using AI making purchases already. And so this allows us to tap into a channel that's expected to grow and actually increase our sales.
Reducing Cart Abandonment with Agentic Payments
The average online cart abandonment is about 70% according to the Baymard Institute. Roughly one in five US shoppers abandon their orders because the checkout is simply too long or complicated. Agentic payments let shoppers complete a purchase inside a conversation using stored credentials. So there's no site navigation, no account creation, no re-entering payment information. And this increased conversion rate. And Microsoft reports that shoppers using Copilot are 194% more likely to complete a sale when the purchase intent is present.
Four Steps to Prepare Your Store for Agentic Commerce
One is to audit your data and enrich your structured product info and review how your data is structured. Two is to build your presence creating an AI-facing brand signals. Three is enabling agents, allowing agents to discover and sell on your store. And four is monitoring and optimizing and tracking that AI visibility to improve the traffic.
Step One: Audit and Enrich Your Structured Product Data
AI agents don't browse your store the way humans do. They rely on structured data. So product info like title, price, material, dimensions must be in standard machine-readable fields. So that's going to be completing all the fields that you can submit to Google Merchant Center and the e-commerce schema markup on product pages that needs to be present. You can be specific with your titles and your descriptions so that it can enrich your data and allow the AIs to index that more narrowly. And you can avoid common pitfalls by not presenting variants as separate products. Don't trap your product info in JavaScript that the AIs can't access. And so really, structuring that product data is going to be the first step.
Step Two: Build Your AI-Facing Brand Presence
What AI agents pull from your store is going to be product data, things like your FAQs, your return policy, shipping info, and the pricing to help shoppers answer those questions that they have when they come to your store. And if a shopper wants free returns, the agent only would consider that brand if they have that policy.
And then some best practices: including customer reviews and Q&As on product pages, publishing policies as dedicated pages with clear headings, using plain language, avoiding those accordion menus with the JavaScript hidden content, using Shopify Knowledge Base which is an app that you can use to train the AI agents on your brand voice, and adding packaging inserts or newsletter signups to capture direct customer relationships can also add value enabling agents to sell for you.
Step Three: Enable Agentic Storefronts
This is going to be thinking of Shopify Agentic Storefronts. Your product catalog, checkout and brand information should be packaged so that AI platforms can present them natively in a conversation. So eligibility as of March 2026, Agentic Storefronts are available to Shopify users and you can check the admin in your dashboard to get access to that. You can set up auto-discovery on ChatGPT. If your products are in the Shopify catalog and you sell to US shoppers, they're automatically discoverable in ChatGPT. You can enable Copilot in Google by toggling that on in the sales channel as well.
The Shopify Agentic plan would be to help let brands on any e-commerce platform list their products in the Shopify catalog and sell through Agentic Storefronts. Connecting products to AI agents across major AI platforms regardless of where you're hosting your store. So, open protocols can make this happen where you can work across existing systems and you don't need to rebuild that checkout to participate. Order flow orders can flow into your dashboard with the full channel attribution and you can retain the ownership of those customer relationships and that's really what Shopify is set up to enable here.
Step Four: Monitor and Optimize Your AI Visibility
This is things like searching like a customer and how they think about searching and asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity what's the best product under the best price, if a brand appears to verify the information. We want to be thinking about how do we monitor that? How do we optimize that? How do we track channel attribution?
So on Shopify, Agentic Storefronts orders show which AI platform drove the sale. So we can think about attribution in terms of which LLM is advantageous for us and how's that actually driving sales and where can we invest more in terms of data and adding value. Using those channel insights to refine your descriptions, your offerings, looking at the schema in more detail from that channel to understand what attributes you can add and understanding how you can optimize it.
What Does Agentic Actually Mean?
Agentic describes an AI system that can act on its own, making decisions along the way rather than waiting for instructions. And in online shopping, this means that AI agents can handle that entire buying journey from searching, comparing, and completing checkout without the shoppers needing to click through. So this adds a lot of speed and flexibility for shopping and reduces down all of that busy work that shoppers usually go through to help increase conversion.
Types of Agent Commerce
Some types of agent commerce are going to be consumer-facing shopping assistants. So these AI agents built into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. So you have a lot of users on those platforms starting to experiment with how they can facilitate their shopping and purchasing using these conversations.
Two is going to be internal business agents. Businesses using agents internally to automate inventory management, fraud detection, and dynamic pricing. So, this is going to be more of a B2B use case in terms of how do you manage your inventory maybe in a wholesale environment and thinking about using agentic for that.
Three is agent-to-agent interactions. These are emerging models still in development where AI systems on both sides of the transaction are communicating to facilitate that sale. So a shopper's agent might be negotiating with a retailer's agent.
The Future of Agent-to-Agent Commerce
McKinsey anticipates a near future where AI agents autonomously reorder household staples when supplies run low and negotiate prices between the shopper's agent and the retailer's agent without any human intervention. And this is really looking far into the future here. Today where we have the AI agents finding products, comparing options and completing an approved purchase. But in the near future, we may have agents autonomously reordering and managing their inventory and post-purchase experiences without any human intervention. And then emerging in the far future will be the agent-to-agent negotiation where you have the AI negotiating with the retailers' AIs and that's going to be an exciting development.
Getting Your Store Ready
So to get your store ready again we'll just go over those steps quickly: audit your structured product data, build your AI-facing brand presence, enable agent storefronts to start selling for you, and monitor and optimize. This can really help increase your sales.
Where We Stand in Mid-2026
This framework on agentic commerce reveals a gap between the current capabilities and the future expectations. The conversational interface is not autonomous. So the most agentic experiences remain chat-based with the human oversight still driving that checkout. True autonomy for those purchases is rare and there's a lot of hype versus the behavior that it can actually present. So despite significant industry buzz and consumer behavior, few users allow agents to complete purchases without that direct supervision.
And discovery reshaped, checkout stable, which is that answer engines are fundamentally altering product discovery. However they've not significantly impacted the actual purchase process and the checkout process. So there's a lot of discovery happening but in terms of checkout it's still definitely on the human oversight.
And then there's high conversion from AI that is starting to drive a lot of interest. Referral traffic from AI chat converts exceptionally well with reports of rates of 15 to 20% which shows a lot of potential for growth.
The Trust Gap
Despite clear consumer interest in agentic shopping, widespread adoption is currently stalled by a significant trust gap, which was highlighted in 2026 research from Commerce and PayPal. 64% of UK consumers want to leverage Agentic AI for their shopping needs, indicating strong underlying demand. However, there's a lot of trust concerns around the AI systems making purchases without that human oversight questioning their reliability, their ethical boundaries. Security worries about data privacy, safety, and payment information being potentially taken or fraudulent. Accuracy concerns around whether AI can truly understand and accurately fulfill those nuanced product preferences. And then just the desire for control. Many shoppers want to have that final approval and the direct control over their purchase even when AI assisted.
Horizontal versus Vertical Agents
These are just thinking of ways to think about agents in terms of a general purpose conversational interface like ChatGPT or more of a vertical which is designed to specialize. And so we'll start to see a lot of agents come in to very specific verticals of what they can assist with. A travel agent managing your itinerary for example or a grocery agent restocking staples in the pantry based on consumption.
Zero-Click Commerce: The New Frontier
Zero-click commerce allows customers to discover, evaluate, and complete purchases entirely with AI assistant chatbots and search overviews bypassing traditional websites. So by 2026, AI agents will initiate and finish transactions autonomously. This is thinking about that zero-click future of the complete consumer trust, the maturing LLMs and those open protocols allowing seamless purchasing with the zero click.
Market Projections by 2030
Leading analysts project a massive expansion in agentic commerce which forecasts indicate trillions of potential revenue. Bain predicting 400 billion. Gartner a 20% increase in transactions via AI. 15% from Morgan Stanley and McKinsey again estimating that 3 to 5 trillion. So a lot of growth is projected and we're thinking about ways that we can tap into that.
The New Commerce Front Door: Answer Engines
The answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI are rapidly becoming the primary starting point for product discovery. Consumers are increasingly initiating their research and fundamentally reshaping how products are found and traffic from AI chats are doing very well reporting rates of 15 to 20%. Given that it's embedded into the workflow of what a lot of consumers are using to complete their work and manage a lot of aspects of their online shopping. So the traditional Google-Meta duo play for traffic acquisition is actually fracturing and brands are starting to look at ways they can use AI to facilitate those interactions.
B2B Agentic Commerce: The Quiet Revolution
From a B2B agentic commerce perspective, this is the quiet revolution where we have a lot of development in how to use agentic in a B2B context. Things like automated workflows where AI agents can automate those complex procurement cycles. This is a really interesting side where we can also look at reduced overhead, businesses significantly reducing the manual purchasing overhead freeing up human resources. Agent-to-agent ordering which is in early adoption. Some platforms are using autonomous B2B orders already. Higher trust: B2B environments often have lower trust barriers than B2C. So this is one advantage from the B2B angle. And the new opportunity: brands can capitalize by setting agent-accessible APIs and catalogs making their offers discoverable and purchasable by B2B AI buyers.
Data Quality: Your Competitive Moat
This is thinking about how AI readiness is increasingly defining those market leaders by the data quality that it's becoming a critical competitive advantage. Based on commerce tools 2026 stats this is no longer optional. Data quality is very important.
And so four ways to think about that: visibility and accuracy, AI agents can only recommend what they read and so incomplete and inaccurate product data means that the brand's risking this AI-driven process. Visibility and accuracy become very important. The language of AI, so understanding the schema and learning schema markup such as JSON-LD become very important here. A recommendation advantage, so brands that invest in rich, accurate and consistently updated product data will gain a significant competitive advantage being recommended more frequently across various platforms. And prioritizing data enrichment, so focusing on those comprehensive product attributes, dynamic pricing and clear return and shipping policies. Create compelling descriptive content to ensure AI agent readiness.
The Delegated Buyer: A Day in the Life
Imagine a future where your AI assistant handles routine purchases seamlessly, ensuring your household runs smoothly without a single click from you. And this is the promise of Agentic Commerce. For example, "I reordered your bi-weekly groceries, added the items you flagged throughout the week, and moved delivery to Saturday at 2 p.m. so it lands before meal prep" and giving you the order total and the card that it was charged to. So really attending to the specific needs of the buyer.
And meanwhile, a brand's dashboard flashes a familiar notification. Agent-to-agent ordering completed. 3,260 agent orders placed today, which would be able to facilitate more orders, scale much faster, and to a greater extent. This really isn't a distant fantasy. This is a near-term vision that's already being built into Shopify.
Strategy over Urgency
A strategy over urgency approach would be the right mindset as Agentic Commerce rapidly evolves. Forrester's mid-2026 framework advises a balanced approach. Don't panic but don't ignore. The key is prioritizing strategy over urgent reactive measures. And so this means focusing on those core fundamentals like data quality, ensuring that your product is accurate, complete and AI readable. Your brand presence, cultivating a clear consistent brand voice and identity that resonates with the AI agents and end users. Structured content, adopting those formats like schema.org to make your offerings easily discoverable and understandable. And avoid chasing every fleeting protocol and platform, but doubling down on the ones that you can control and the ones that have the highest levels of trust, brand clarity. So, think of it as the new SEO for the AI era where we really want to start to optimize with a strategy.
Key Takeaways
It's a massive market opportunity. The agentic commerce is projected to grow 3 to 5 trillion by 2030 and AI is really shaping discovery. So it's increasing at 15 to 20%. The way that consumers are discovering products is becoming conversational. Data quality is paramount. This is the new era of AI and managing data is ever more important. Trust is the key barrier but also an opportunity to find ways to use AI agents to make those recommendations with that trust and this is the key to adoption. B2B leading the way with agent-to-agent transactions and the ability to create a more scalable environment for a B2B context. Those open protocols are really core things like ACP and UCP enabling the seamless agent-to-agent communication. And then creating a strategy over urgency. So really taking a look at those core fundamentals and investing for that long-term advantage.
Next Steps
So where are the next steps from here? Well, you want to audit your whole customer journey. You want to improve your retention systems, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and measure and optimize consistently. These are our four fundamentals for growth.
About Minion
And we are Minion, a team of strategists, developers and designers enabling e-commerce specialists while helping Shopify brands grow through our specialization in e-commerce. And our process is broken down into some basic stages here. Discover, strategize, build, optimize, and scale. So how we help Shopify brands grow? We do Shopify development, conversion optimization, store redesign, system integrations, and ongoing support.
And we'd like to end this webinar with a complimentary Shopify growth audit. So if you are in a stage where you have a store or you have a brand that is interested in these areas: conversion review, customer journey analysis, technical assessment and other opportunities and recommendations, we'd like to make a complimentary offer here to do a growth audit for you.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss with us some opportunities for growth, you can get in touch with us and schedule a strategy session to receive some personalized recommendations and the highest impact opportunities and how agentic commerce can actually work for you as well in 2026. So you can head over to minionmade.com/contact and schedule a call with us.
So I want to thank you guys for attending this webinar. That's it from our side. If you have any other questions, you can reach out to us on our website. And again, I want to thank you guys for attending and I hope you have a great day. Take care.
