As shopping becomes more sophisticated and digitally enabled, agentic commerce is changing the retail industry. It’s turning traditional retailers into what might be called “super retailers” that deliver premium customer experiences and enable exponential growth.
The first significant AI wave was generative AI (gen AI), which has seen broad adoption by retailers and consumers over the past few years. For example, 62% of U.S. consumers now turn to AI-powered experiences like Google AI Overviews to inspire purchases, check prices, and compare brands. Retailers have been able to use gen AI to rapidly automate processes such as creating marketing content and synthesizing customer feedback.
Agentic commerce represents the next wave of innovation, in which AI agents not only assist with research but also simplify the checkout process, automate post-purchase services, and handle other tasks. Nearly 68% of retailers are expected to deploy agentic AI for key operational and enterprise activities within the next 12 to 24 months.
So, where should you start on your agentic commerce journey? Here are three strategic considerations for retailer CIOs to keep in mind.
1. Avoid building from scratch
Agentic commerce should be designed to support IT departments and developers by simplifying integrations, enabling efficient data use, and minimizing impact on infrastructure resources.
Seek agentic commerce solutions based on open standards like the Unified Commerce Protocol (UCP), as well as Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite, which delivers enterprise-grade reliability, strong security, and seamless experiences across every channel. Operationalizing agentic commerce requires the ability to quickly scale and maintain high performance as consumer demand increases.
2. Aim to better connect with consumers
A significant portion of retail marketing focuses on encouraging customer segments to engage with a brand’s digital or physical presence. Agentic commerce enables organizations to deliver experiences that feel personalized and contextually relevant.
For example, rather than asking consumers to enter product names or SKU numbers, agentic commerce experiences allow for natural language conversations with an AI agent. Individuals should be able to ask broad questions about a product category and let an AI agent intelligently guide them to the best possible options.
Think of it this way: Many people don’t enjoy feeling overwhelmed browsing aisles in a physical store or wading through hundreds of products online. This same sentiment carries over into the agentic world. Search and discovery capabilities should be a cornerstone of agentic commerce in retail.
3. Go deeper than institutional memory
When retail was limited to physical experiences, consumers often appreciated store associates who remembered their interests and preferences. Agentic commerce takes that concept further by unifying large volumes of data and analyzing it to improve the entire shopping journey for every customer.
This translates into bringing together everything from point-of-sale transactions to site visits and purchase histories — offering a comprehensive view of customer activity. In addition, retailers can use AI agents to provide more relevant product picks, offer the most appropriate shipping options, and address frequently asked questions.
Behind the scenes, unified data helps retailers predict trends, tailor and personalize future marketing campaigns, deepen segmentation efforts, and enhance attribution.
Get started now
A strategic partnership between Shopify and Google Cloud is helping retail CIOs and their teams accelerate their agentic commerce journeys.
The Shopify platform leverages Google Cloud infrastructure, ensuring 99.9% uptime — including during retail shopping seasons. Also, Shopify is on the Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easier for IT teams to integrate the technologies that best suit their business’s needs.
Even if you’re just starting your agentic commerce journey, the partners make it seamless to buy, build, and scale incrementally with composable components like custom code and open protocols.
Learn more about how to strategically build agentic commerce with Shopify and Google Cloud.