This week, I’m ruminating on the word mirage.
It is a useful term for the ongoing debate over if and when agentic shopping – as in, people assigning agents the latitude and payment info to make purchases on their behalf – will actually happen. Unlike “illusion,” say, or a term like “potential” or “promise,” the “mirage” of agentic commerce denotes the truer and far greater anxiety that drives this trend for large software companies.
A potential mirage might save your life, if it proves true, or it might drag you deeper into the desert.
For companies like Shopify, Criteo and Instacart, and even for giants like Amazon and Walmart, all of which are all in on agentic commerce investments, figuring out if the agentic oasis is real and has a place for them is priority No. 1.
Reasons to believe
