Agents are rewriting the rules of commerce—here’s what to know

A conversation with Toby Brown and Paul Tepfenhart, Google Cloud's market leads for financial services and consumer transformation 

A new form of commerce is emerging, agentic commerce, where AI agents handle the entire shopping journey autonomously — from discovering products to negotiating prices to completing purchases — all based on a conversation about what a consumer needs.

Agentic commerce isn't just about AI recommending products; it's about AI-powered digital assistants managing the entire purchasing process by interfacing with customers and collaborating with each other directly. This creates both an existential challenge and an unprecedented opportunity to redefine relationships and traditional workflows with customers. Toby Brown and Paul Tepfenhart offer crucial insights into a future powered by agentic commerce and how executives across industries can prepare.

There’s a lot of buzz around agentic commerce and how agents will redefine merchant interactions. How do you define “agentic commerce,” and what makes it so transformative?

Toby Brown: In the near future, both consumers and merchants will have their own AI agents working for them. Agentic commerce happens when these intelligent agents act on behalf of buyers and sellers to manage the shopping experience end-to-end, with a “human in the loop” when necessary. 

Shoppers will embrace AI agents that help them discover products, compare options, negotiate prices, and complete purchases, giving them exactly what they want at a price they’re willing to pay. Agents working for merchants will handle everything from personalizing product recommendations and managing inventory to negotiating with consumer agents and processing transactions. A merchant agent might simultaneously engage with thousands of consumer agents, offering personalized deals, confirming product availability, and coordinating fulfillment across the entire supply chain.

This will be a seismic shift. Companies must prepare for a future where online product discovery moves beyond the traditional methods of searching and browsing websites. 

Paint us a picture. What does the consumer shopping experience powered by agentic commerce actually look like?

Paul Tepfenhart: Let’s start with the typical online shopping experience today. Say you need a jacket for your upcoming vacation. You go to a website, search for "jacket," then filter by size, color, price, brand, and spend a ton of time scrolling through pages of results. This can get frustrating, because many of the results won’t even come close to what you have in mind.

Now imagine this instead: You tell a shopping agent, "I'm going to Honolulu next week and need a jacket that's warm when it's windy but breathable when it's sunny. I want pockets, and it should pack small. My budget is under $100."

The agent responds within moments with a selection of lightweight, packable jackets in your size with a promotion customized to you. It shows you wearing them at popular Honolulu spots, demonstrates how they compress into travel pouches, and even suggests complementary travel bags. It lets you know when the jacket could be delivered to you and confirms that your selection is in stock. Behind the scenes, your agent might be negotiating with multiple brand agents simultaneously, securing bundle deals or special promotions, confirming delivery options and inventory availability, and ultimately setting up a transaction. It’s unleashing a personal shopper that does all the hard work for you.

Tell us a little more about agentic commerce operations behind the scenes. What other industries may be impacted and how?

Toby Brown: Agentic commerce will be a game changer across industries within the commerce value chain. In marketing, for example, agents will be able to continuously understand, model, and act on consumer preferences through web signals and social media interactions, ensuring messaging and product discovery opportunities hit the mark.

This extends to supply chains, where agents will continuously monitor inventory levels, manage raw materials, and automatically reorder based on predictive analytics. Essentially, agents will work autonomously on the backend of the shopping journey to reason, act, and optimize on behalf of the consumer at speed. With our latest announcement introducing the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), these AI agents can now take transactions one step further by connecting with other agents to complete purchases for consumers.

For banks, this new transaction model intensifies the competition to be the "top of wallet" default, evolving the battleground from mobile wallets to the AI agent's preferred payment method. Simultaneously, financial institutions must set up their data for how agents are interacting with their consumers, as agents managing a person's daily life may increasingly lead the direct end-customer relationship.

How does the rise of agentic commerce shift the traditional roles of brand and product discovery, and what does this mean for marketers?

Paul Tepfenhart: With agents proactively guiding consumers, brand and product discovery are shifting from a user-led to an agent-influenced process. Marketers must now ensure their brands and products are not just discoverable by humans but also highly recommended by AI agents. These requirements necessitate a new focus on providing high-quality, structured data that agents can easily understand and utilize to provide the best experiences to consumers. 

For marketers, this means your primary brand asset is no longer just your logo or slogan — your data is your new competitive edge. An AI agent isn't persuaded by a clever ad campaign; it's convinced by structured data that proves your product is the best fit for its user's highly specific, in-the-moment need. Beyond a customer’s emotional connection to your brand, loyalty now also depends on whether your loyalty program's benefits are clear enough for an AI agent to interpret when calculating the best possible deal or offer. If your loyalty program offers free overnight shipping, a 10% discount, or double reward points, that information must be perfectly structured in your product feed. 

Ultimately, in the age of agentic commerce, the brands that win will be those that provide the most helpful, accurate, and comprehensive data, allowing AI to do the work of connecting their products to the customers' needs.

With agents capable of autonomous purchasing and negotiation, how might this impact pricing strategies and the negotiation process between consumers and agents? 

Toby Brown: Autonomous purchasing and negotiation will make pricing strategies more dynamic while adding a layer of accountability. The negotiation process will happen in real time, with merchant agents offering personalized promotions based on a variety of factors. With recent advancements, agents will be capable of monitoring prices and automatically executing a purchase when the price is right, giving consumers more control over their spending than ever before.

The introduction of autonomous agents also signals the end of pricing as a static number and the beginning of programmatic negotiation. We're moving from a one-to-many pricing strategy to a dynamic, one-to-one model where the "negotiation" happens between two machines before a human even sees the final offer. This shift introduces a new layer of complexity and opportunity, forcing the industry to evolve from simply processing payments to securely enabling an AI to act on a user's behalf.

This creates a critical challenge: how do you trust an agent with a user's financial credentials and purchasing power? How do you prevent fraud when the "person" making the purchase isn't a person at all?

This is where a standardized, open framework becomes essential. To address this, Google is collaborating with leaders across the payments and merchant ecosystems to deliver innovations like the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). The goal is to create a common language for secure, agent-based transactions, moving beyond simple processing transactions toward building the secure, interoperable infrastructure that will power the next generation of commerce.

What capabilities do enterprises need to develop if they want to embrace agentic commerce?

Paul Tepfenhart: First, you need the ability to develop sophisticated agents that can interact seamlessly with other agents. Second, you need to ensure that your data and catalogs are set up so that agents can easily understand your products and information. Third, you need to offer personalization that goes beyond basic recommendations to truly reflect shopping intent and context. And finally, you need enterprise-grade security for autonomous agents, including proper guardrails, policy enforcement, and compliance frameworks.

The good news is that enterprises don't have to build all this from scratch. Google Cloud provides the infrastructure, AI models, and tools to support and accelerate agentic commerce transformation. We understand how people search, discover, and make decisions. We combine that deep expertise with foundational AI capabilities like Gemini models and Vertex AI. But beyond core technology, we're also building the ecosystem infrastructure needed to enable AI success, including interoperable agent-to-agent protocols, security frameworks, and payment systems.

What's your key takeaway for executives considering agentic commerce?

Toby Brown: In a year's time, I predict a majority of consumers will regularly interact with AI agents for shopping. The question isn't whether to embrace agentic commerce, but how quickly you can position your organization to thrive in this new reality.

Start with your data foundation, build agent-ready infrastructure, and maintain a human-in-the-loop approach for critical decisions to foster trust while you scale these capabilities. Most importantly, begin forming partnerships with players that help embed you into the right agentic ecosystems as the world shifts. 

The executives who move decisively now won't just adapt to the agentic commerce revolution, they'll lead it — and Google Cloud is ready to be your partner on that journey.

To learn more about how Google Cloud can help your organization prepare for the agentic commerce revolution, visit our website.