The data: A new study from Microsoft shows the kinds of actions that AI agents are taking on behalf of consumers when they enter websites, indicating where marketers should prepare for non-human interactions.

Microsoft analyzed more than 230,000 projects across Clarity, its behavior analytics platform, and identified agentic sessions that used OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic ecosystems. In these sessions:

• Checkout accounted for 25.2% of all agentic actions, form submissions made up 19.9%, and outbound clicks reached 14.3%.
• For non-agentic sessions, the order of the top three is reversed: outbound clicks accounted for the highest share of actions (27.0%), followed by form submissions (18.6%), and checkout (14.7%).

Appointment bookings, search, and logins each accounted for less than 10% of actions in an agentic session, while calls to action (CTAs) including show more, check availability, add to cart, and download made up less than 5% each.

Note that agentic sessions may not have been entirely completed by agents—while each “agentic session” involved an agent, it may also have included a human handoff along the journey—a change that Microsoft couldn’t isolate.

What it means: AI agents are primarily helping consumers take concrete actions when visiting websites, and many of these use cases are lower-funnel exchanges with website owners, such as completing checkout or submitting a form. As consumers adopt agents as shopping assistants—we expect the number of US genAI shopping users to increase 14% next year to 95.5 million—they may grow more comfortable entrusting these tools with duties beyond sourcing information.

However, while the report suggests that agents are acting closer to the point of purchase, it doesn’t demonstrate whether agents are actually completing purchases on behalf of consumers. More than half of US digital shoppers haven’t used AI checkout and aren’t interested in doing so, per Bizrate Insights and EMARKETER.

Recommendations for marketers: Meet growing trust in AI by making it as easy as possible for agents to move through webpages and bring a consumer to checkout interfaces, such as through providing clearly marked checkout links wherever a product and its information appear.

This strategy should also apply to form submissions to gather zero-party data, which marketers can use to gather phone numbers and email addresses. Since consumers appear willing to let agents submit forms on their behalf, marketers may want to increase the number of opportunities to do so on their website, especially if fully agentic checkout behaviors are still a ways away from being widely adopted.

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