The lack of a standard definition for agentic commerce reveals a fundamental split in how the industry is preparing for AI’s role in shopping

“My definition of agentic commerce is the entire shopping process, from product discovery to price negotiation to checkout, all of it done autonomously on your behalf,” said Ryan Verklin, retail media and paid media senior lead at Bayer, during an IAB Connected Commerce session last week. He argued that anything requiring human approval is simply an evolution of search, not true agentic behavior.

This was echoed by Andrew Lipsman, founder and chief analyst of media, ads and commerce, at Colosseum Strategy.

"What I don't think it can be is just simply throwing everything that is AI assisted or AI Search Driven, and calling that agentic," he said. "We had AI before we had agentic. Agentic has to be differentiated in a way, and to me it comes down to that level of autonomy."

Still, others see it differently.

“I think that agentic at its core is that it's taking an action, and that can be a sequence of actions, but it doesn't necessarily have to be all of them strung together. There’s a spectrum of agentic behavior,” said Scott Collins, senior director of product strategy at Moloco Commerce Media.

While this may seem semantic, the definition matters because it shapes how retailers and brands prepare for the future.

"We're asking retailers and brands to prepare for a certain future,” said our analyst Sarah Marzano. “And I find that those who have a very wide aperture on what qualifies as agentic commerce are the same camps that are saying autonomous purchasing is coming."

AI referral traffic may actually boost retail media

Contrary to fears that AI assistants will cannibalize retail media revenue, early data suggests they may enhance it by driving higher-quality traffic to retailer sites.

• Consumers arriving from AI platforms spend more time on retailer sites, view more pages, and convert at higher rates than average visitors, according to SimilarWeb data cited by Marzano.
• "If the referral traffic from AI assistants ends up seeing more of the retailer's real estate and having higher intent, that can only mean good things for retail media," she said.

Meanwhile, Lipsman's analysis of the top 15 retailers found a positive relationship between the percentage of traffic coming from generative AI referrals and YoY website growth.

"If it were true that AI was pulling from their traffic, you'd expect to see a negative relationship," he noted. Instead, retailers receiving more AI referral traffic showed stronger overall growth.

And AI isn’t just driving growth from existing customers: Walmart reported that 50% of traffic from ChatGPT represents net new customers, said Marzano, demonstrating AI platforms' ability to expand retailer reach rather than simply shifting existing traffic.

AI agents are shrinking retailers’ window of influence

While AI may not pose a direct threat to retail media, it is compressing the decision-making process, reducing the moments where retailers can shape outcomes and capture ad-driven value.

“What agents do is they sort of eliminate that point of indecision,” said Collins. “And that point of indecision is where a lot of ad clicks happen on a retail media site.”

Retailers can maintain a role in the decision-making process by building their own on-site agents powered by proprietary data.

"If a retailer that has tons and tons of experience can actually train a model to view that experience out, then there's a reason for that shopper to continue to come to that retailer,” said Collins.

Retailers should also prioritize the touchpoints they still control, particularly those in the physical world.

"Most of the long tail is just getting started in-store. Retail media is a huge opportunity that is much less under threat by digital discovery paths, and that's where other retail media networks have so much runway," said Marzano.

This was originally featured in the Commerce Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.