By Deann Evans, Managing Director, EMEA, at Shopify

Commerce is entering its agentic era. Shoppers are already using AI agents to discover products and complete transactions on their behalf, across any surface where a conversation might take place – from search engines to chat interfaces.

For retailers, the question isn’t whether to prepare for agentic commerce, it’s how to show up wherever your customer is having a conversation, with checkout, brand, and customer relationships intact.

Shoppers are already here

According to Shopify’s 2025 Holiday Retail report, two-thirds (66%) of UK shoppers say they’re likely to use AI for at least one part of their shopping journey. And more than one-third (36%) report that they’ve purchased more from brands offering AI-driven personalised recommendations.

Consumers increasingly expect brands to offer a tech-enabled (including AI-powered) shopping experience, tailored to their specific needs.

Our merchants are seeing the impact of AI too. Since January 2025 on Shopify, AI traffic to merchant storefronts is up nine times and orders from AI searches are up 14 times.

With this in mind, it is encouraging to see 93% of UK merchants have invested in – or plan to invest in – AI tools that help customers discover and buy products.

But there is more to it than that. Merchants can look to use the right tools, within a consolidated tech stack and built on connected, intelligent data foundations.

The current status quo of AI

For merchants, AI agents can take on the time-consuming and often dull tasks such as automating product imagery, targeting customer segments and optimising performance across platforms.

That means merchants can focus on what inspired their business ambitions in the first place; innovating and delivering great customer service.

Many consumers, meanwhile, believe AI will make their shopping experience better and even help them save money. Almost a third (29%) globally said they’re likely to use AI to search for deals, and 20% to find inspiration and new products.

But while AI’s influence is growing, trust remains a crucial consideration for consumers.

Almost three-quarters (73%) of shoppers globally say buying from a person still matters. This presents both a challenge and opportunity for merchants.

As retailers seek to find their place in the AI landscape, merchants can balance convenience and innovation with connection and control.

How merchants can thrive in the emerging AI landscape

It is clear that AI tools are the driving force behind innovation in the modern era of commerce.

The challenge now is for merchants to adapt to this, and harness the tools available to them. There are three key strategies merchants can adopt to succeed today, and prepare for what is still to come.

1. Harness unified commerce. AI tools do not work in isolation.

Merely bolting them on to an existing tech stack does nothing for efficiency or innovation. Multiple tools overlapping but not in sync or communicating is going to add time rather than streamline work.

Instead, merchants can deploy AI across a unified commerce stack. One that connects online and offline experiences, centralises data, and allows technology to work as one intelligent system.

After all, AI is only as effective as the data it can access. Merchants that consolidate their operations around a single source of data and customer insight  can be best placed to unlock the most value from AI technologies.

2. Embrace orchestration over execution. Where AI previously centered on task execution (such as writing a product description or addressing customer segments), merchants may look to shift their focus towards AI orchestration instead.

This gives rise to declarative commerce, where merchants express intent and AI executes the how.

For example, “raise margin on trainers without denting conversion” – and the system will propose and execute the mix of pricing, merchandising, and media.

That’s the shift from task automation to outcome intelligence, as AI becomes an orchestration layer across the entire business rather than just a tool used in isolation.

3. Focus on trust-led commerce. In this new era of agentic commerce, identity and trust are the new foundations, and both must be integrated into the full commerce tech stack.

The new commerce environment demands a security model where identity is verifiable across surfaces, agent actions are permissioned and data access is controlled by default not by exception. Security in commerce is also inherently shared.

Platforms, merchants, partners and app developers all play a role, but the job of the commerce platform is to ensure merchants have the tools to thrive in this AI-first environment.

New commerce infrastructure for an agentic world

While many retailers are excited about the potential of AI, the reality of integrating these technologies into day-to-day commerce operations is often more complex.

To help bridge that gap, new tools and open standards are emerging that help make AI more connected.

One example is the launch of the Universal Commerce Protocol, developed in partnership between Shopify and Google, which enables AI agents to interact with any online store.

This helps bring a more interoperable AI-powered shopping ecosystem, and moves us beyond simply layering AI on top of commerce — instead making it entirely native to the way commerce functions.

That includes the rise of agentic storefronts, which now allow merchants to sell directly inside AI-driven environments like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Chat GPT and others. This enables discovery, conversation and conversion to all happen in the same moment.

Such developments to platform and infrastructure are making it easier for merchants to embed AI into every layer of their operations.

Any surface that can hold a conversation, make a plan, and take actions becomes commerce-capable. This consistency keeps brand identity intact, even on LLMs.