Agentic CX & Commerce: The Next Frontier of AI-Driven Engagement

It is one of the most impactful shifts of power we have seen in the e-commerce world. Say goodbye to search engines and e-commerce platforms, and welcome conversational agents that provide curated recommendations, product and price comparisons, and amazingly easy checkout experiences. ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout, for instance, powered by an agentic commerce protocol, empowers users to buy directly from Etsy sellers on chat mode from more than a million Shopify merchants. Amazon’s recently launched ‘Buy for Me’ feature executes the consumer’s intent to buy products from other stores?with seamless flow. 

Welcome to the world of agentic CX and commerce, an exciting new frontier of AI, where the AI agent autonomously completes muti-step task execution by interfacing across multiple systems. In short, it unifies action across fragmented digital infrastructures, while keeping the control and experience layers centralized.  

AI at the Core of Autonomous Engagement 

The emergence of agentic AI has elevated AI’s role from enabling efficiency to driving transformation. It actually redesigns the way work is done by integrating AI into core operations.  

When generative AI came on the scene, it first enhanced customer support with its ability to create and run internal FAQs—and soon graduated into delivering answers to customers through chatbots. Today, we have moved from a generative world into an agentic one, with AI autonomously making decisions and taking actions for humans. 

Now, add commerce to the mix, and you literally have an experience transformation. Evolved as they may be, almost all commerce experiences have the customer performing the searching, sorting, comparing, and decision making. Agentic CX and commerce flips the experience around to do this work for the customer, creating a novel manner of autonomous engagement. Agentic commerce does more than allow businesses to meet customers where they are and complete their purchases seamlessly. It actually acts for the buyer and embeds their identity, intent, purchase, and payment options with deep context and assurance.

Such a smart blend of agentic AI, commerce, and customer experience sets in motion a reimagination of processes. Agentic CX and commerce moves beyond being a strong enabler to actually designing decision-making, workflows and outcomes. In a landscape where customer expectations demand personalized anticipation of needs, agentic commerce promises intelligent and autonomous participation to create customer delight. 

An Evolutionary Leap to “Zero Click” Commerce Experiences 

 A rapid evolution of agentic commerce is under way—one that has swiftly moved from personalized nudges to predictive guidance and is now making its way to the autonomous and end-to-end actions of closing purchases, managing fulfillment and returns, and even negotiating purchases.  

 Let’s take the e-commerce setting. Across its value chain, new search experiences can be created. Plus, most of the actions (selecting the right purchase parameters, negotiating offers and discounts, confirming preferred payment options, inputting shipping details) can also be completed when purchasers indicate interest through an agent. Today’s single-click checkout experiences may well become tomorrow’s zero-click experiences with agentic CX and commerce.  

 In banking, agentic commerce can be deployed for customer onboarding, comprehensive virtual banking services, and fraud detection and mitigation actions—without human intervention. In travel, agentic CX and commerce can fulfill the demands of concierge services, flight disruption management, and creation of personalized travel experiences. Similarly in healthcare, this technology can take over scheduling of appointments, triaging of symptoms, and processing of insurance claims. And telecommunication users can experience the best of support in the areas of technical troubleshooting, plan offers and upgrades, and billing and payments. 

 In all cases, we are talking about AI agents that manage workflows end to end without human intervention. This can be achieved by embedding AI deeply into key customer touchpoints, governed by an integrated digital experience strategy. 

Beyond Strategy to Revenue Generating Outcomes 

A Bernstein study predicts that agent-driven experiences could enhance e-commerce conversion and unlock more than $240 billion in additional revenues. This is not surprising as agentic AI can place its signature across various revenue-generating outcomes:

• Dynamic pricing with intelligent real-time decisions 
• Inventory management with agility and instant execution 
• Swift launching of promotions and bundling of products  
• Frictionless ‘zero-click’ and ‘instant’ checkouts, to dramatically increase conversion rates 

As with every game-changing opportunity, agentic CX and commerce can also have its fair share of challenges. The top three imperatives include (a) ensuring ethical standards, (b) building trust through data integrity and security, and (c) providing access to relevant data sources to manage complexity. 

Addressing these challenges calls for a clear vision and meticulous execution built on the core principles of autonomous intelligence, real-time orchestration, and human-centric control—and the following best practices: 

• Clarity of goals and objectives, and measurable KPIs 
• Continuous and comprehensive data and feedback systems to build the right models—plus, investments in context modeling and improvement of natural language understanding  
• Modular and interoperable platforms with clear integration road maps aligned to business goals 
• Scalable AI infrastructure and the right automation systems for effective agent updating and retraining  
• Implementation of stringent data governance policies and systems for end-to-end security and compliance; plus, regular audits for bias, data diversity and?responsible AI practices  
• “Human-in-the-loop” principle for training in empathy and emotional intelligence 

 Diverse interconnected layers have to seamlessly synchronize to develop agentic commerce at speed and scale.  The critical need is to build autonomous customer journeys that are intelligent and adaptive. Success in achieving this rests on a core foundation of efficient and AI-friendly customer and product data, an intermediate layer of core logic and accurate decisioning engines, and a front-facing experience layer enriched by generative AI and composable architecture.  

 This is just the beginning of the game-changing agentic CX and commerce journey. In the near future, various trends are set to further reimagine this exciting world—such as immersive AI experiences with augmented and virtual reality, and collaborative interaction among multiple AI agents for more nuanced solutions. AI agents and increasingly sophisticated hardware are converging to enhance innovations that improve both user and customer experiences. For businesses, agentic CX promises smarter operations, marketing precision, and scalable automation, unveiling the full promise of unified commerce. 

Bhaskar Dhawan leads the global service line for digital engineering & experience at Mastek, overseeing initiatives spanning digital applications, cloud engineering, CX/commerce, and AI.