38%
of consumers are using answer engines to discover new products
Chuck / Forrester dataField Notes / Interview series
Agentic Commerce
Field Notes
A conversation with Chuck Gahun about Forrester's State of Agentic Commerce research, the gap between discovery and autonomous transaction, and what businesses need to change as agents become a new commercial channel.
// 01
One Big Idea
“This is not a tech issue. This is definitely a content and data issue.”
Agentic commerce is advancing, but it is not yet autonomous. The immediate work is less glamorous than the hype suggests: clean up the content, clarify the data, build trust and decide deliberately where the business will participate.
// 02
By the Numbers
17%
are completing a transaction inside an answer engine
Chuck / Forrester data13%
of US and UK adults are comfortable letting an agent complete a task
Chuck / Forrester data44%
would hold the answer engine responsible if something went wrong
Chuck / State of Agentic Commerce3
brand levers: context, fluency and trust
Forrester framework70%
of Katja's collected agentic-commerce narrative is focused on rails, pipes and utility
Katja's field analysis// 03
The Brief
The conversation, separated into the ideas that matter for people building, governing and designing the next commercial layer.
EvidenceExecCX
Agentic commerce is advancing, but not yet autonomous
Forrester's deliberately unglamorous verdict: discovery and assisted shopping are moving faster than fully autonomous consumer transactions.
Customer behaviourCommerceCX
Discovery is ahead of transaction
People are willing to use answer engines to find and compare products, but many still leave the agentic channel to complete the payment themselves.
Payments and trustPaymentsValues
Payments are the widest trust gap
Consumers worry about losing control, making the payment step the place where agentic commerce becomes a question of accountability.
Content and operationsMarketingData
Context, fluency and trust are the brand levers
Agents need enough context to be useful, language that maps cleanly to the market, and consistent verifiable facts that reduce inference.
StrategyExecStrategy
Be deliberate about where you show up
The agentic channel is not an all-or-nothing programme. Businesses need to decide what they want to make available, when and why.
ArchitectureProductTech
This is an operating model question
Agentic commerce reaches into content operations, order management, inventory, APIs and the architecture of an agentic layer.
Future signalsCommerceExec
B2B may move faster than B2C
Buying groups, clearer permissions and established payment guardrails may make business-to-business agentic commerce the nearer-term opportunity.
ValuesLeadershipCX
Who sets the terms when an external agent arrives?
Commercial sovereignty becomes a practical design question: when does a business participate, under which conditions and with what protections?