Over the past three years, “agentic commerce,” once a speculative idea, is now a strategic priority, but the misalignment between Retailers and their ecosystem is obvious. The rise of consumer-facing LLM (large language model) fueled the idea of “autonomous shopping” or “agentic shopping”. Agentic commerce now blooms in conference keynotes, whitepapers, and strategic roadmaps as the next inevitable phase of Retail.
But let’s be clear on what is at stake. It is not how quickly agentic commerce will arrive, nor how technically sophisticated these “agents” will become. The real stake is whether this direction aligns with the purpose of retail at all.
The enthusiasm surrounding agentic commerce is not the result of consumer demand nor of technological necessity. It stems from a deeper structural misunderstanding within Retail and from the economic incentives of the systems that surround it. But first, let’s examine the way retail progressively externalised its strategic centres.
Retail Lost the Plot : the Salvation Reflex
Retail’s fragilities did not begin with AI. They began with a long-standing series of misdiagnoses on the evolution of commerce.
For more than a decade, Retail has operated under the assumption that digital disruption, and particularly the rise of e-commerce, exposed its structural weaknesses. E-commerce is now a superior model: scalable, measurable, optimised, and frictionless. Brick-and-mortar became synonymous with cost and rigidity. The pandemic intensified this belief when some Retail leaders misread temporary behavioural shifts as non-negotiable structural truths, the famous “new normal”.
This produced a “salvation reflex“, inseparable from the Agentic Commerce misalignment we are witnessing. Every new technological trend became a potential cure, but this reflex rests on false dichotomies: physical vs digital, legacy vs innovation. Digitalisation did not destroy Retail. What weakened Retail was losing sight of its own purpose, its very own mission.
Instead of challenging what it exists to create, retail has a new obsession: how to catch up. Once we frame the debate like this, every technological promise feels urgent, even if it does not serve a strategic mission or fit with the brand.
The Slow Externalisation of Retail’s Strategic Core
To understand why agentic commerce appears so irresistible and how misalignment is getting obvious, one must observe how the past decade reshaped Retail. Retail’s mission historically rests on three strategic pillars:
- Curation : selecting what enters the consumer’s world.
- Experience: turning products into meaning and desire.
- Fulfilment: delivering reliably and with trust.
Yet through the progressive adoption of external platforms and systems, Retail has progressively ceded parts of each of those pillars:
- Traffic moved from proprietary websites to commerce platforms.
- Discovery moved to search engines and marketplaces.
- Customer understanding moved to analytics providers.
- Personalisation moved to recommendation engines.
- Loyalty and identity moved to third-party wallets.
Now, Agentic Commerce promoters propose that even intent (the most strategic of all layers) should be externalised. Sold as a new disruption, it is another sign of misalignment between Agentic Commerce and Retail.
The more retailers surrender their strategic core to intermediaries, the more they reduce themselves to fulfilment endpoints. Reliable, operationally efficient, but strategically interchangeable.
Agentic commerce continues this trajectory. Retailers no longer need to understand or influence consumers’ desires, because desires can be delegated to an agent. If that shift occurs, the retailer ceases to be a retailer and becomes an infrastructure like the others.
Agentic Commerce does not understand human desirability
Agentic commerce is built on one simple promise: frictionless consumption. It implies fewer decisions, fewer steps, fewer interruptions, and to reach consumption bliss, experience must be frictionless. But framing “shopping” as a series of frictions is dangerous, because in the modern world, people shop with meaning. Consumption is not a mechanical optimisation problem. Once again, we dig dipper the misalignment between Agentic Commerce and Retail.
Jean Baudrillard, in his essay The Consumer Society, argues that Modern Consumers shop for signs; therefore, within consumption lie emotional, cultural, and social aspects, even some prestige. It is frequently irrational and therefore escapes the cold logic of a machine.
So in short, Retail creates value not by shortening the path to a product, but by shaping the context in which choices acquire a social or cultural significance. Yet the logic of agentic commerce assumes that some data points (price, availability) and patterns (previous buying, predicted utility) only shape behaviour. Therefore, some of the most valuable dimensions of consumption are not quantifiable and considered negligible:
- personal taste,
- aspiration,
- cultural resonance,
- sense of identity,
- pleasure of browsing,
- social dimension of buying,
- surprise of discovery.
If shopping were such a rational act, supermarkets and comparison engines would have already solved the retail structural problem they are facing. But they haven’t, because desire resists prediction. Thinking in this sense, Agentic commerce doesn’t promote personalisation of prestige, it reduces it to the little part that the agent could understand.
The result is a much flatter world: brands are commodities. Curation suddenly appears to be irrelevant, and differentiation for the brand eventually dissolves. The assumption that automation inherently understands desire is what’s behind the promise of agentic commerce, and it is false.
The Real Engine Behind the Hype: Incentives from Ecosystem
If agentic commerce misunderstands Retail, why does it progress so rapidly? Because the Retailers are not empowered with the momentum, their ecosystem is. The payments industry, platforms, and technology ecosystem economic incentive depends on increasing volume, predictability, and strategic centrality. Our focus will be on the Payments Industry.
Despite the rhetoric around frictionless automation, nothing changes in the underlying payment stack. Agentic commerce, actually, reinforces the existing payment architecture :
- The card remains the default funding instrument of agentic commerce
- The four-party model remains the backbone.
- Interchange, tokenisation, authentication, or liability rules persist.
- Fraud and dispute processes remain unchanged.
In a way, Agentic commerce does not simplify payments; it merely wraps the same architecture in a new interface.
Moreover, in Payments, adoption has never been determined by technical merit but by incentive alignment. As a consequence, above the fact that it keeps the complexity of the current model, this model aligns perfectly with the interests of all participants (PSP, Schemes, Issuers, Acquirers). This alignment explains why the model gains momentum even though the underlying payment realities remain unchanged. The promise of autonomy becomes a way to reinforce existing economics, not to transform them.
Last but not least, the intermediaries from the value chain can benefit from a deeper dependency to create a better predictability. Autonomous transactions generate:
- more volume,
- more metadata,
- more identity checkpoints,
- more scoring opportunities,
- more reasons for intermediaries to sit at the centre.
Agentic commerce thus strengthens intermediaries precisely because it does not change the foundations of the system. It creates new layers of dependence built on the same infrastructure.
The Manufactured Narrative and the Limits of Consumer Acceptance
One of the most interesting aspects of agentic commerce hype is how quickly we have assembled a complete narrative around it. Autonomous shopping is presented as an imminent Revolution. This does not come from requests from consumers or because the infrastructure is mature. No, it is the ecosystem surrounding the Retail sector that has already built a convincing story.
To make this story intuitive, the promoter of Agentic Commerce draws on a long-established cultural semiotic: the promise of discreet, effortless delegation of service, like Mechano Maid 2000 in The Jetsons. Since the 1950s, we have exposed Western societies to visions of domestic automation that promised comfort and simplification. These images made technological progress feel familiar and safe. Today’s agentic commerce narrative borrows from this imaginary. Through keynote decks, design mockups, and strategic storytelling, it frames autonomy as a logical continuation of a future we have been taught to anticipate.
This familiarity is strategic; it lowers resistance and anchors the idea before real adoption occurs.
However, it also hides a fundamental tension: the narrative is advancing despite limited consumer appetite for complete delegation.
Consumers want to stay the driver of their car
As research consistently shows:
- People accept automation in routine, predictable tasks.
- They resist autonomous financial decisions.
- They want to retain control over choices tied to identity, taste, and emotion.
- They distrust opaque decision-making, especially in payment contexts.
In other words, consumers seek assistance, and certainly not replacement.
This mismatch matters. Agentic commerce imagines a world where delegation becomes normal, while consumers remain reluctant to give up autonomy in the very categories that generate retail’s cultural and economic value.
Yet the narrative persists, precisely because it serves the interests of the surrounding ecosystem. Payments, platforms, and intermediaries benefit from a future where intent is captured upstream and autonomy generates more predictable flows. By presenting agentic commerce as inevitable, they seek to shape expectations before behaviour emerges.
This is where narrative becomes a form of soft infrastructure. It frames retailers’ strategic decisions in advance, pushing them to prepare for a future consumers themselves have not chosen, and may not fully adopt.
The result of all these is a structural uncertainty:
Agentic commerce may scale in narrow, low-risk domains, but the broader retail landscape will continue to depend on the human logic of desire, interpretation, and identity (elements that cannot be automated away simply because a narrative presents it as progress)
Retail’s Future Depends on Purpose, Not Automation
Agentic commerce is entering the retail discourse with the appearance of inevitability. But inevitability is a story shaped by the incentives of surrounding systems, not by retail’s mission or consumers’ expectations.
The real question is not whether autonomous agents will exist; it is whether retailers allow these agents to define their identity. Retail could retain strength not through more automation, but through sovereignty:
- over meaning,
- over curation,
- over the emotional logic of choice,
- over the customer relationship,
- over the non-delegable parts of consumption.
Technology should support that sovereignty, not replace it. The sophistication of autonomous agents should not determine what the future of retail will be, but rather the conscious choice with which retailers decide what must remain human, intentional, and irreplaceable.
