How agentic commerce is changing the customer experience

• Key insights: Agentic commerce is changing the way brands such as American Express, Google and Walmart interact with their customers. 
• Expert quote:  “AI is going to increasingly determine what brands show up and is presented back to the customer for their consideration, and so it’s an opportunity for businesses to think about making sure that they’re discoverable.” — Margaret Ryan, SVP, Head of Product, Amex Digital Labs.

LAS VEGAS — Agentic commerce is not just promising to reshape payments, it is also changing the way brands such as American Express, Google and Walmart interact with their customers. 

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Agentic AI works as an intermediary between customer and merchant, and that has put retailers in a tight spot: Some merchants are still working out the finer details for making their products and services discoverable by those agents and maintain important touch points with their customer. 

“Agentic commerce upends the current model that drives all shoppers back to the merchant website,” Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting, told American Banker. 

There’s a lot for a company to consider before they can sell their products and services to AI agents. For example, brands now have to worry about how an AI agent is going to interact with their brand on behalf of the customer, and what information that agent is going to pass back to the consumer, according to Margaret Ryan, senior vice president and head of product at Amex Digital Labs. 

“AI is going to increasingly determine what brands show up and is presented back to the customer for their consideration, and so it’s an opportunity for businesses to think about making sure that they’re discoverable, [that] the AI agents aware of what value that they can provide, and that you’re being presented to the customer as part of that consideration set,” Ryan said during a panel at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. 

That’s also true for Amex and other payment companies, which also have to consider similar questions. 

“One of the things we’re focused on is how do we take our existing relationships and extend them into these AI platforms where our customers are increasingly engaging,” Ryan said. “But beyond that, also making sure that our cards are showing up, and so that customers can use their Amex credit card when they’re engaging in these new commerce journeys.” 

Merchants connect their product catalogues to AI agents through model context protocols, which are an open standard for connecting AI agents to external data sources. It is what allows the large language model to surface up a “blue, size-10 running,” when a consumer asks for it. 

Agentic AI is also changing the level of detail that consumers expect, Lisa Yokoyama, director of product management at Google, said during the panel. 

“[Consumers] use conversational AI as a way to really go deeper, to get more specific about what they’re looking for, with a more precise and longer set of queries, and more in-depth research that just makes it easier to compare different product offerings,” Yokoyama said. 

Still, a majority of consumers — 75% — still want to shop with their preferred merchant even when AI is doing the shopping for them, according to Amex’s Ryan. 

“It goes beyond just the brand preference; it’s also what’s the value that the merchant can provide,” Ryan said. “Whether it’s loyalty points, your credit card rewards, a personalized offer — brands still matter to customers.” 

For Walmart, AI agents are a tool to facilitate the customer relationship rather than replace it, Vice President of Payment Acceptance Trent Addington said during the panel. 

“Agentic commerce is not about taking the human out of the shopping experience, it’s really about how we use technology behind the scenes to make shopping more intuitive, to make shopping less complicated,” Addington said. 

“There’s an opportunity here for agentic to actually make personalization more personal,” he said. “There’s so many more signals that we can take and understand. We know our customers really well… And I think that’s where personalization can really have some magic.”

Payments will likely be the break point in facilitating consumer trust in this new commerce channel, Addington said. 

“We talk a lot internally on our team about what’s the most personal aspect of that entire shopping journey from beginning to end,” Addington said. “I would argue it’s the time of payment. Customers expect us to get it right every time.”