A silent revolution is reshaping the world of online commerce. The customer clicking the 'buy' button is increasingly not a person, but an artificial intelligence agent acting on their behalf. This emerging paradigm, known as agentic commerce, represents a fundamental evolution from digital storefronts to digitized decision-making.
What is Agentic Commerce and How Does It Work?
Agentic commerce moves far beyond simple chatbots or personalized recommendations. It involves autonomous economic agents that operate within a set of predefined goals and constraints set by a user or a business. As explained by Vineeth, a manager at Bain & Company, "E-commerce digitized the storefront. Agentic commerce digitizes the decision."
In this model, a human defines their intent—such as budget, quality standards, delivery deadlines, and risk appetite. The AI agent then takes over, researching options, evaluating trade-offs, negotiating terms, and completing transactions independently. "Once intent is delegated to an agent, buying stops being an activity and becomes a background process," Vineeth adds.
For consumers, this could mean an AI managing all recurring household purchases, automatically switching suppliers based on price fluctuations or stock availability. In the business-to-business (B2B) realm, procurement agents can continuously source vendors, ensure compliance, negotiate contracts, and place orders without human intervention.
The Three Key Drivers Enabling the AI Buyer
This shift is becoming possible now due to the convergence of three critical technological capabilities.
First, the rise of domain-specific AI agents. Unlike general-purpose assistants, these systems are deeply trained in specific verticals like procurement, travel, or healthcare. They possess an intricate understanding of pricing models, contractual norms, and industry-specific trade-offs.
Second, agent interoperability is crucial. Emerging standards, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and new frameworks for agent-to-agent communication allow these AI systems to exchange structured data, compare offers, and negotiate across different platforms. This turns commerce into a machine-readable process rather than a page-based experience.
Third, programmable payments provide the financial infrastructure. Technologies like tokenization, modern payment rails, and smart contracts enable agents to transact securely within set limits. They can hold budgets, trigger conditional payments, and settle transactions automatically once predefined criteria are met.
Major marketplaces and commerce platforms are acting as critical enablers by exposing their inventory, pricing, and policy data through agent-friendly interfaces, often using standards like MCP. This allows merchants to join the agentic commerce ecosystem without overhauling their entire technology stack.
Implications for Markets, Marketing, and Trust
The rise of AI buyers signals a profound change in how markets will compete. When purchasing decisions are delegated to agents, traditional marketing levers that appeal to human emotion become less effective. Brand storytelling gives way to objective criteria like reliability, transparent pricing, and machine-verifiable performance data.
"Marketing doesn't disappear," clarifies Vineeth. "But it changes. You are no longer selling to emotion. You are competing on objective criteria an agent can verify." This forces companies to rethink their strategies, ensuring product data is structured, pricing is explicit, and service levels are provable. In an agent-mediated market, opacity becomes a competitive disadvantage.
However, this autonomy introduces new challenges around trust, observability, and security. Every decision made by an AI agent must be explainable, auditable, and reversible. Robust systems for identity verification, permissioning, and spend controls become paramount. "Trust is the constraint," Vineeth states. "Without strong observability and security, people won't hand over decision rights."
The Future of Buying in India and Beyond
Agentic commerce is not poised to replace all purchasing. High-stakes or emotionally charged decisions will likely remain under human purview. However, for routine, repetitive, and rules-based transactions, autonomy is set to become the default mode.
The businesses that will thrive are those that start designing for AI agents today—by providing clean, structured data, enabling programmatic access, and redefining how value is communicated in a machine-driven marketplace. Vineeth concludes with a pivotal strategic shift: "The most important strategic question is no longer 'How do customers choose us?' It's 'How do agents evaluate us?'"
As AI agents evolve from mere assistants to active economic actors, commerce itself is transitioning from a series of human interactions to a seamless process of execution. The digital checkout will still exist, but increasingly, no one will be consciously standing in line.
