It’s taken over 20 years for e-commerce to get to 16% of global retail sales. If we draw a parallel, agentic commerce will be much faster. I predict we’ll get to 10% in three to five years.
The mass consumer adoption of AI technologies, whether that’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT with 800 million weekly active users or Google AI with 1.5 billion monthly active users, means there’s a huge, scaled audience already for agentic commerce.
Brands are recognising that these are new interfaces within which consumers who are researching for goods and services might eventually want to fulfil the whole, end-to-end buying journey.
As with the beginning of e-commerce, AI represents a new distribution channel for businesses to get their heads around, but it’s easier because the audience is already built, there are already five and a half billion people online, and the guardrails of commerce.
If you ask anyone, “In five to 10 years, do you think there will be more buying through AI than today?” Very few people are saying ‘no’. We all know it’s coming; it’s just a question of how fast and how scaled it is. Is it a micro-niche of really confident people, or is it a mass market proposition?
