🤖🛒Will consumers use autonomous agents to purchase products? Is agentic commer
By Laurenlivak · April 18, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
🤖🛒Will consumers use autonomous agents to purchase products? Is agentic commerce the future?🤖🛒
This is a hot topic in the industry today and one I recently wrote about in my Snackable Commerce newsletter. At the IAB Connected Commerce event this year there was also a fun debate about the topic led by Caroline Giegerich featuring Sarah Marzano, Andrew Lipsman, Ryan Verklin & Scott Collins!
Here are some of my favorite takeaways and quotes:
1️⃣ There is no one definition of agentic commerce
The panel couldn't completely agree on a single definition. Some took a hardline stance, defining it as "from product discovery to any price negotiation to checkout all done autonomously on your behalf.” Others viewed it as a broader "spectrum of agentic behavior," arguing that an agent merely needs to take an autonomous action or sequence of actions on a user's behalf.
2️⃣ Will consumers actually let AI buy things for them?
One panelist argued that fully autonomous shopping is a "collective hallucination," stating that consumers "never ever want to transact on these environments" because they prefer the curated, purpose-built environments of retailer websites and physical stores. The other perspective is that convenience rules all. For "low consideration, low preference" items like dental floss, consumers will gladly let an agent execute the purchase.
3️⃣ Will Retail Media be a casualty of agentic commerce?
Despite the hype around LLMs taking over the shopping journey, the panel was surprisingly optimistic about the future of retail media. Early data shows that AI-referred traffic to retailer sites actually tends to spend more time browsing and converts at higher rates. Instead of killing retail media, one expert noted that "agentic commerce is only going to enhance retail media and create new formats that we haven't even imagined yet.”
The debate was also interactive. The audience was polled and 56% of the audience agreed on one core truth: Retail media will survive, but it will be "fundamentally transformed.”
Where do you stand? 👇