What is the actual point of agentic commerce?
6 hours ago
- Agentic commerce is defined as an AI agent making a purchase without any human interaction with the vendor; the human may specify the purchase intent or leave it to the agent.
- Major companies (Google, Visa, Stripe, Amazon, Microsoft, Mastercard, Oracle) are developing protocols, APIs, and features to support agentic purchasing.
- Key advantages for buyers include reducing time for purchases that are unpleasant, require heavy specification, need fast turnaround, are too cheap for human time, involve extensive research, or require coordination with other purchases.
- Key advantages for sellers include faster customer acquisition, AI-powered customization from RFPs, consistent and business-aligned sales, easier evidence provision, and the ability to sell low-value items.
- Overall, agentic commerce primarily reduces buyer time and seller customer acquisition cost (CAC).
- Personal examples include using an agent to handle a lawyer separation agreement and a medical second opinion, though lawyers may use template services as lead generation for larger deals.