Agentic commerce readiness has a clear pecking order, and it follows the transaction. The closer a company sits to checkout, the further along it is.

All six digital retail platforms in a benchmark of 106 consumer companies hold an explicit agentic commerce strategy or better, according to an October report from Kearney, and five of the six already run a live agentic offering. Of the 53 consumer products companies in the same benchmark, just two operate anything live.

Shoppers have already made their move. AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, according to data Kearney cites, and that traffic now converts 42% better than other channels. A year earlier, it converted 38% worse. Two in five US consumers have used AI for online shopping, and 85% of them say it improved the experience.

Kearney built its benchmark by rating 12 months of each company's own communications, on a five-level scale that runs from no mention of AI to a live agentic commerce offering in market. The results show retailers wiring themselves into AI channels while most brands are still working on getting found.

Retailers have taken agentic commerce to the boardroom

Retailers own the transaction and the customer interface, so they can build assistants and plug into AI channels directly. They are doing both. Among domestic and specialty retailers, 11 of 16 have reached at least strategy level, and eight run live offerings. Chief executives discuss the topic on earnings calls, and it has entered formal risk disclosures: Walmart names emerging agentic platforms among its competitive risks, and Kroger's annual filing flags potential disintermediation from the customer relationship.

The early returns explain the urgency. Amazon attributes roughly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales to Rufus, now Alexa for Shopping, and Walmart reports that users of its Sparky assistant spend 35% more per order, according to the report.

Travel retail sits at the other end of the scale. Just two of 11 operators have reached strategy level or beyond, and none discloses an AI commerce strategy to investors. The capability exists: Lotte Duty Free launched Korean travel retail's first ChatGPT shopping service in July 2026, and WH Smith is piloting an in-store AI shopping assistant at Melbourne Airport.

The interfaces retailers own today can be disintermediated by the ones consumers prefer tomorrow. The contested question is access, meaning who may shop a retailer's catalog through third-party agents, and on whose terms. Retailers that haven't picked a posture yet are letting competitors and platforms set those terms for them.

Consumer brands are chasing AI visibility below the C-suite

Manufacturers depend on being found, and most of the active ones are working on exactly that. Just 20 of 53 consumer products companies have reached strategy level or beyond. Kearney classifies most of the active players as visibility optimizers, companies working to ensure AI systems find, represent, and recommend their brands.

The work pays off when it gets done. Mondelēz reports that Oreo's citation share in cookie-related AI answers rose from about 10% to roughly 70% after it made its content machine-readable. L'Oréal goes further, pairing visibility management across its brands with its own agent offering, from its Beauty Genius advisor to a marketplace with a purchase path and virtual try-on coming to ChatGPT.

AI visibility is a measurable metric that brands can move. Kearney argues that visibility is only one piece, and that the companies moving fastest also build dedicated teams with the authority to act and the processes to turn visibility into revenue.

Paid placement and price comparison are raising the stakes

AI shopping is quickly becoming a paid channel. OpenAI now runs advertising inside ChatGPT, and that business reached an estimated $1 billion revenue run rate after 200 days, according to Kearney's report. Commercial intent is climbing alongside it: the share of ChatGPT conversations with commercial intent rose from 13.9% to 19.2% in a single year, an estimated 28 billion buying conversations annually.

Kearney expects paid visibility in AI channels to become its own discipline next to earned presence, which forces a reallocation decision. Marketers will need to decide where to pull budget, whether from broad-keyword search or underperforming retail media, and where to spend it to buy presence at the new moment of decision. Early movers will set their cost benchmarks for AI-mediated consideration before the auction gets crowded.

Agentic commerce has moved into media planning and revenue management. Brands and retailers should start with assets they already own, such as recipe libraries, replenishment hardware, health and diagnostics data, and age-verified first-party ecosystems, and connect them to the channels where consumers now decide.