Agentic Commerce: How AI Shoppers will transform E-commerce by 2036 (June 2026)

10 years into the future, so around 2036, human traffic on the web is projected to make up less than 20% of the internet, with some very aggressive tech forecasts predicting it to be as low as 5%! That’s madness and it means that your beautifully prepared product carousels or authentic marketing copy are no longer seen by people! How sad is that?

Welcome to the era of agentic commerce!

What is agentic commerce? The concept of agentic commerce is where autonomous AI agents act as the actual shoppers, taking on the tasks of researching products, comparing options, and completing transactions from start to finish on behalf of humans, sort of like personal shoppers that rich people have.

Unlike traditional e-commerce, which involves us human users manually dragging our mouse over a table to control what we click on, browsing and purchasing items, agentic commerce offloads this tiresome responsibility to intelligent software, in other words, an algorithmic recommendation layer inside someone else’s AI assistant! This means we can all do a Rihanna and pretend we have a Jahleel Weaver and Amir Alvi running around for us.

Consumer-facing AI systems like OpenAI’s Operator or Amazon’s Alexa Plus utilize intent, memory, and specialized protocols to navigate online stores securely, selecting goods and executing transactions according to our pre-set budgets and preferences and any other information we might have shared with it on our shopping habits.

The result is your website in a few years time will be as useless as a TomTom in 2026. So what do you do? In preparing for this inevitable shift, South Africans must pivot from optimizing storefronts for the human eyeballs to creating systems suitable for machine-readable evaluations. Of course, most people and their website designers will have no idea how to do this. I, however, do, and here are some tips to get you started…

Firstly, structuring high-quality and machine-readable data is absolutely crucial. So so important! You see, these AI agents do not perceive a product’s value through sensory experience but rather through technical specifications. They shop without emotion! Businesses need to expose data via APIs offering details like product availability, pricing, shipping speeds, and even the return policies; all need to be accessible through open data protocols. Needless to say, one of the first things I would do is an audit of data completeness, focusing on top-selling and high-priority items first. Setting up automation of data collection through OCR and generative AI tools would also be a box I try to click.

What’s next? I would focus on upgrading payment infrastructure for autonomous transactions. Never make it harder to get payment. Old traditional checkouts rely on manual human verification, such as CAPTCHAs, and they hinder legitimate buying AI agents, afterall they can’t very well click on “I am not a robot” because, well they literally are! Adopting open commerce protocols and integrating with standards like Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol or the OpenAI/Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol can help streamline transactions and get your site ready for these AI shoppers, and don’t forget about getting ready for machine-authorized tokens and also using agentic payment layers offered by modern fintech networks.

Second to last, you must work on trust and cybersecurity frameworks, designing systems that distinguish between revenue-generating buyer agents and malicious entities – and there are going to be many e-scoundrels out there trying to cause havoc! A priority is creating distinct access layers and re-evaluating liability policies to handle automated processes. Lawyer up!

Finally, although this subject is far from exhausted, consider deploying on-platform AI brand agents. Rather than waiting for external agents, you can deploy your own brand concierges to guide incoming AI agents or even the few remaining human ones. Tools from Alhena AI or Salesforce Agentforce could help with this by assisting in discovery, cart building, and offering custom recommendations on digital channels owned by the business.

If you are a future-thinking business manager looking to get with the times, audit your operations, prepare your site for these AI Shoppers, then you can reach out to me, and we can tackle the future together!