For the past few years, “agentic commerce” has been the kind of term that shows up in analyst reports and conference keynotes — interesting, probably important, but abstract enough to feel like something to plan for later.
Eduardo Frias, Field CTO Enterprise at Shopify, closed that window during a live roundtable in May 2026.
“Roughly two-thirds of people are using LLMs with some kind of commerce intent,” he said, citing Shopify’s own platform data shared during their most recent earnings call. Traffic and orders arriving through AI channels are growing at double-digit rates year over year. And the customers arriving through those channels aren’t just more numerous — they’re more valuable. Higher conversion rates. Higher average order values. Customers who have done their research before they arrive, and are ready to buy when they do.
“It’s not ‘oh, it’s coming.’ It’s here.”
What’s actually changing in how customers shop
The shift isn’t just about AI-powered search replacing traditional search. It’s about a fundamental restructuring of the shopping journey — and what that means for where and how brands need to show up.
Tamer Selim, CTO of Evereve, put the operational implication directly: customers aren’t arriving through the homepage anymore. They’re discovering brands through prompts, images, social platforms, AI agents, and physical stores — simultaneously and non-linearly. The assumption that a customer starts at your homepage, moves through your navigation, and arrives at a product page is already outdated for a significant and growing portion of your traffic.
Todd Dean from Psycho Bunny had noticed the same pattern in their own customer behavior data. “A lot of people are coming in the middle of the funnel — landing on PDP pages now. They’re more willing to go to a store and do an in-store order and have it fulfilled and sent to them quickly versus trying to get the right inventory in the right store at the right time all the time.”
The customer’s journey has become non-linear, multi-surface, and high-intent by the time they reach you. The brands equipped to serve that customer — with real-time inventory visibility, consistent data across channels, and fulfillment flexibility — will capture them. The brands that aren’t equipped will lose them to competitors who are.
Why unified commerce is the prerequisite
Agentic commerce doesn’t work on fragmented data. When an AI agent — or a customer using an LLM — queries your catalog, your inventory, your pricing, and your delivery promise, it’s hitting your systems in real time. If those systems are out of sync, the agent gets bad data. If your inventory is inaccurate, the promise breaks. If your customer record is inconsistent across channels, the experience is incoherent.
Frias made this connection explicit. “ChargePT or Gemini or Copilot hitting your APIs to understand your catalog, your availability, your pricing, your delivery promise — that is happening today.”
Brands that have done the work of unifying their data layer — building on clean, consistent, real-time inventory and customer data — are positioned to show up coherently in every one of those interactions. Brands that haven’t are either invisible in AI-driven discovery, or worse: present but inaccurate, which is more damaging than being absent.
The compounding advantage
Bill Gibson, CEO of Deposco, noted a pattern that’s been consistent across a decade of data: customers who engage with a brand across multiple channels are significantly more valuable than single-channel customers. “Consumers that are shopping multichannel, in a unified commerce way — they’re just more valuable to the brands. They’re going to buy more frequently. They’re going to engage more frequently. Annual values of those customers multiplied two x, three x, four x and more depending on the brand.”
Agentic commerce accelerates this dynamic. Customers arriving through AI channels have already done more research than a typical organic search visitor. They arrive with higher intent, higher trust, and higher willingness to spend. The brands that show up well in that context — with accurate inventory, fast fulfillment, and a consistent experience across every surface — are going to compound that advantage over time.
The brands that don’t are already falling behind. Not in a future scenario. Now.
What to do about it
The through line from every panelist on this topic was consistent: every investment in data quality, organizational alignment, and platform discipline is also an investment in being positioned for agentic commerce. These aren’t separate workstreams. They’re the same work.
Selim’s framework for Evereve: make sure you can show up wherever the customer is in her journey. That means being discoverable through AI-driven search. It means having inventory data accurate enough to make promises you can keep. It means an experience that’s consistent whether the customer arrives through a prompt, an image search, a social post, or a store.
The operational foundation for all of that is unified commerce. Not integrated commerce. Not a collection of connected systems. A single data layer that powers every channel and every interaction — including the ones being driven by AI agents that your customer is using right now.
“It’s a cheat code. If there’s a way to get to unified commerce faster, go for it.”
— Todd Dean, Interim Strategic Lead, Technology & Transformation, Psycho Bunny
See how Deposco’s unified commerce and fulfillment platform positions you for the agentic commerce reality that’s already here.
