Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce is a way of buying and selling in which an AI agent searches for products, compares them, places the order and pays on the buyer’s behalf, within limits the buyer has approved. The buyer gives the request and the budget, and the agent does the rest.

What is agentic commerce?

The e-commerce most people know is built for someone tapping a screen: open the app, search, filter, add to cart, pay. In agentic commerce, software handles those steps. Google gives the example of a shopper telling an agent they want this jacket in green and are willing to pay up to 20% more for it. The agent watches inventory and buys as soon as the item is in stock (Google Cloud, Announcing the Agent Payments Protocol, September 2025). If an AI only suggests products and leaves the purchase to the user, that is not agentic commerce yet.

Why is agentic commerce in the news in 2025 and 2026?

Three protocols for agent-led shopping appeared within four months:

• September 2025: Google announced AP2, an open protocol for agent-initiated payments, with more than 60 partners such as Mastercard and PayPal.
• September 2025: Stripe and OpenAI launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) along with Instant Checkout, which lets ChatGPT users in the US buy from Etsy sellers without leaving the chat (Stripe Newsroom, September 2025).
• January 2026: Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. The seller stays the merchant of record, meaning the official party making the sale (Google for Developers Blog, January 2026).

Morgan Stanley Research estimates that “agentic shoppers” could account for $190 billion to $385 billion of US e-commerce spending in 2030, or 10% to 20% of the market (Morgan Stanley, December 2025). That is a forecast for the US and does not apply to Vietnam.

The model is still changing. In March 2026, Shopify switched to a new approach with ChatGPT: shoppers discover products in ChatGPT but pay on the merchant’s own website (Digital Commerce 360, March 2026).

How does agentic commerce work?

The hard part is trust. AP2 asks three questions: did the user really authorize the agent to buy this item, does the agent’s request match what the user meant, and who is accountable when a transaction goes wrong. Its answer is the “mandate,” a digital contract with a cryptographic signature. An Intent Mandate records the request and its limits, such as a price ceiling or a deadline. A Cart Mandate records the exact items and the price the user approved.

On the ACP side, Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token, a code that only works for one seller and one cart total, so ChatGPT never sees the card number.

For sellers, the agent does not look at banners. It reads feeds and APIs: product name, price, stock, shipping fee, return policy. Get one field wrong and the product drops out of the comparison.

An example in Vietnam (hypothetical)

All of the launches above are for the US market. Suppose a similar feature arrives in Vietnam. Lan tells her AI assistant: “buy 2 boxes of unsweetened nut milk, under 300,000 VND, delivered before Friday.” The agent compares prices, sends her the cart to approve, then pays. A brand whose feed shows the wrong promotional price, or leaves out the word “unsweetened,” is eliminated before Lan sees a single ad. The work worth starting now is cleaning up product data and tracking how your products appear in AI answers (see GEO).

How it differs from related terms

In agentic commerce, the buyer is the one using an agent. When sellers use agents to run campaigns, that is agentic AI in marketing.

Frequently asked questions

Will agentic commerce replace e-commerce marketplaces?

There is no sign of that so far. Under both ACP and UCP, the seller still receives the order, ships it and handles returns. The agent adds one more way for orders to come in.

Where should a small business start?

With product data: clear titles, complete attributes, and prices and stock updated daily. Marketplace ads already need exactly these things.

If you want to review your product data and your ads on Shopee, TikTok Shop and Lazada, Vietnam’s main e-commerce marketplaces, Adtek’s Brand Commerce team can go through them with you. Reach us through the contact page.