Forrester's Agentic Commerce Workshop: Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Why Agentic Commerce Is the Most Important Conversation in Business Right Now

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool that assists human decisions — it is increasingly making decisions on its own. Nowhere is this shift more visible, or more consequential, than in commerce. Agentic commerce, the practice of deploying autonomous AI agents to handle purchasing, negotiation, customer engagement, and supply chain decisions, is rapidly moving from a buzzword to a boardroom priority. Yet despite the growing noise around the topic, most businesses are still asking the wrong questions about it.

That is precisely the problem Forrester is addressing head-on at its upcoming CX Forum events. With a dedicated workshop titled "Catalyze Agentic Commerce — How To Move From FOMO To Focus," Forrester is inviting business leaders, digital commerce strategists, and customer experience professionals to step back from the hype and start building a grounded, actionable understanding of what agentic commerce actually means for their organizations.

What Is Agentic Commerce and Why Does It Matter?

Before examining why Forrester's workshop is so timely, it is worth understanding exactly what agentic commerce means. At its core, agentic commerce refers to commerce experiences driven by AI agents — autonomous software systems capable of perceiving their environment, reasoning through options, and taking actions with minimal or no human oversight.

In practical terms, this could mean an AI agent that monitors your company's inventory levels and automatically reorders stock when thresholds are reached. It could mean a customer-facing AI that not only answers product questions but also negotiates pricing, applies discounts, processes payments, and arranges delivery — all within a single, seamless interaction. It could also mean AI agents that represent buyers, scouring the internet for the best deals, comparing products across multiple retailers, and completing purchases on behalf of their users.

The implications for brands, retailers, and commerce platforms are profound. When AI agents become significant participants in purchasing decisions, the entire dynamic of customer acquisition, conversion optimization, brand loyalty, and search visibility shifts dramatically. Companies that understand this shift early will be positioned to thrive. Those that do not risk being bypassed entirely — not by competitors, but by algorithms.

The FOMO Trap: Why Businesses Are Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the most insightful aspects of Forrester's workshop framing is its diagnosis of the current state of business thinking around agentic commerce. Many organizations are currently driven by what Forrester aptly labels FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out. Executives hear that agentic AI is transforming commerce, they see competitors announcing AI initiatives, and they rush to implement something — anything — without a coherent strategy.

This FOMO-driven approach typically leads to a set of surface-level questions:

• How do we deploy an AI chatbot on our website?
• Which large language model should we use?
• How do we integrate AI into our existing tech stack?
• What is our competitor doing with AI that we are not?

These are not inherently bad questions, but they are tactical rather than strategic. They focus on implementation mechanics rather than on business outcomes, customer impact, or competitive positioning. The result is a fragmented collection of AI experiments that consume resources without delivering coherent value.

Forrester's workshop is designed to help participants escape this trap by reorienting toward deeper, more strategic questions — the kind that lead to sustainable competitive advantage rather than short-term noise.

What to Expect From Forrester's CX Forum Workshop

The workshop, "Catalyze Agentic Commerce — How To Move From FOMO To Focus," will be held at two Forrester CX Forum events in June 2025: CX Forum East in New York City and CX Forum West in San Francisco. These venues reflect Forrester's intent to reach both East Coast enterprise ecosystems and the West Coast technology innovation hubs — two of the most strategically important commercial corridors in the United States.

Attendees can expect the workshop to cover several critical dimensions of agentic commerce strategy, including:

• Defining the right use cases: Not every business process is a good candidate for agentic AI. The workshop will help participants identify where autonomous agents create genuine value versus where they introduce unnecessary complexity or risk.
• Understanding the customer experience implications: Agentic commerce fundamentally changes how customers interact with brands. Workshop sessions will examine what this means for trust, personalization, privacy, and long-term loyalty.
• Building governance frameworks: Autonomous agents making commercial decisions raise serious questions about accountability, transparency, and compliance. Participants will explore how to build oversight structures that keep AI agents aligned with business values and regulatory requirements.
• Measuring what matters: Traditional e-commerce KPIs may not accurately capture the value or risk generated by agentic systems. The workshop will introduce frameworks for evaluating agentic commerce performance in meaningful ways.

Who Should Attend the Agentic Commerce Workshop?

Forrester's workshop is particularly well suited for customer experience leaders, chief digital officers, e-commerce directors, and technology strategists who are tasked with shaping their organization's AI roadmap. It is equally valuable for marketing leaders who are beginning to grapple with the reality that AI agents may soon represent a significant segment of their effective audience — one that responds to data signals and structured content rather than traditional advertising or emotional branding.

Retailers, financial services firms, B2B commerce platforms, and consumer goods brands will all find actionable insights relevant to their specific contexts. The cross-industry nature of Forrester's research ensures that the frameworks presented are broadly applicable, while the workshop format allows for the kind of peer discussion and real-world scenario planning that generic conference keynotes simply cannot provide.

The Strategic Imperative: Moving From FOMO to Focus

The most valuable takeaway from Forrester's framing is the shift from reactive anxiety to proactive clarity. FOMO leads to scattered investment, misaligned teams, and solutions in search of problems. Focus, by contrast, leads to intentional experimentation, coherent strategy, and measurable outcomes.

The organizations that will lead in agentic commerce are not necessarily those with the largest AI budgets or the most advanced technical infrastructure. They are the ones that ask the right questions first — questions about customer value, business model alignment, risk tolerance, and long-term differentiation.

Forrester's CX Forum workshop offers a rare opportunity to develop that kind of strategic clarity, guided by one of the world's most respected research and advisory firms. Whether your organization is just beginning to explore agentic commerce or is already running pilots that have stalled without a clear path forward, this workshop is designed to help you build the strategic foundation needed to succeed.

Register Now and Get Ahead of the Curve

The agentic commerce era is not coming — it is already here. Every month that passes without a coherent strategy is a month in which competitors, technology partners, and AI-native startups are pulling further ahead. Forrester's CX Forum East in New York City and CX Forum West in San Francisco provide the ideal environment to cut through the noise, challenge your assumptions, and emerge with a focused, confident plan for navigating this transformational moment in commerce. Do not let FOMO drive your AI strategy. Let focus define it.