If there’s one trend that has been dominating the global e-commerce industry in 2025, it’s the accelerating adoption of agentic commerce tech. Here’s what you should know about it.
Undoubtedly, the penetration of AI technologies into various sectors of the digital economy has significantly increased in recent years, and this process will only continue in the months to come. Namely, according to the 2025 Stanford AI Index Report, the global private investments in generative AI solutions have jumped by almost 20% YoY since 2023, up to 33,900,000,000 USD. More importantly, the adoption of B2B AI tech also accelerated in 2024, with 78% of companies admitting their regular use of AI for their business needs.
In the online commerce segment, in particular, whereas the adoption of generative AI has also become common among businesses of various sizes, a new trend emerged in 2025, in full synergy with the other niches of economy, where the development of agentic AI, designed to execute complex operational tasks has been booming recently – it’s known as agentic commerce.
What Is Agentic Commerce & Its Use Cases?
In plain words, the term “agentic commerce” encompasses a variety of agentic AI use cases in the online commerce industry.
These primarily include the so-called customer-related solutions, like Agentforce by Salesforce or Operator by OpenAI, both designed to help retailers provide shoppers with more advanced, autonomous co-pilots in their purchasing journeys, which handle personalized order selection and updates, as well as any other interaction with the e-commerce services, if needed.
Namely, among other things, OpenAI’s Operator can act as a full-fledged virtual assistant to a customer, which can perform clicks, browse across e-commerce websites/apps and complete orders, e.g. buy groceries, concert tickets, or else, with minimum human input. Of course, a person can step in and tweak their order at any time, without having to start all over again.
Non-surprisingly, Amazon couldn’t stay out of the competition either, and has also been developing its agentic commerce solution, having added advanced agentic AI capabilities to its voice assistant Alexa (currently available to Alexa+ users). The scope of its functional capabilities includes service bookings and order compilation/completion without the need for a customer to intervene in the process.
Meanwhile, on the backend, agentic commerce solutions are aimed at helping e-commerce companies simplify their supply chain and inventory management operations, handle the logistics and accounting, as well as deal with other tasks required.
Perspectives of Agentic Commerce Adoption
It goes without saying that the future of agentic commerce is as bright as it could be, especially since the price to adopt AI technologies has drastically fallen over the past several years (i.e. 280 times, per the Stanford report). Particularly, not only can we expect the rapid expansion of agentic AI use by e-commerce platforms outside the U.S. and EEA, but also its fast adoption across purchasing systems, online shipping and parcel delivery industries in 2025 and beyond, too.
However, as promising as it all may look on the surface, the reality is, the sophistication of available AI agents in e-commerce still has a long way to go to actually take business processes to the next level.
More importantly, as the evolution of agentic AI continues, the key barrier to their adoption by small and mid-sized companies, at least for the time being, remains its high price, not to mention the substantial associated costs required for its technical implementation.