What is agentic shopping?

Soic shopping is relatively new and I think the the the goal of the agentic shopping is to shorten the path between when a consumer is ready to buy and all the various steps they have to go through. Now one of the things that AI has has brought to the consumer is the ability to do discovery. Right? So previously uh you know maybe you saw an ad the ad had a product. It may have been a kind of product you might be interested in. It may not have been the exact product but even if it was you when you click on the ad you might end up at a retailer site. Uh they may be out of stock or you know it may be it may cost much more than it would at another retailer. So what Agentic commerce is doing is leveraging the power of uh LLM based AI platforms which are excellent places for discovery. So now if you’re in the market to buy um skin cream or something like that, you can go to Chad GPT or Perplexity and ask a lot of questions, you know, where do I buy this? And if you have specific needs for dry skin or you’re going on vacation, you need um you know sunblock with that. So you can kind of discover and then you can make your choice ultimately to go to the retailer site to buy. Now um instead of going to the retailer site to buy, what a lot of these platforms are doing is providing a buy now, buy here uh experience, right? So you can just click on the um button and what the LLM will do is actually go and conduct the purchase for you. And I was talking earlier about agentic workflows. It’s a perfect example of an agentic workflow. uh there’s some discovery happening before that but when you say buy now the LLM is actually making a call into the retailers tech platforms to complete the purchase that would involve going to the retailer site just like a human would uh finding the product putting it to the shopping cart uh you know passing the credit card information and actually completing the purchase picking shipping options and so on so forth. Now, you’re probably wondering, well, like how does it know all that? Well, as you use um uh the AI platform, it learns more and more about your preferences, right? Which credit card do you typically like to use to pay for it? What which shipping option do you prefer, etc., etc. So, as it learns more and more about your preferences, it can largely complete the process for you. If it gets to a step where it needs to ask you something, it’ll come back and ask you. But largely, it will try to complete the task that you asked it to do, which is to buy the product.