Ensure That You're Asking The Right Questions About Agentic Commerce

Why Most Companies Start Their Agentic Commerce Strategy in the Wrong Place

The rush toward agentic commerce is accelerating across every major industry. Executives are eager, budgets are being allocated, and pilot programs are launching at a pace that would have seemed extraordinary just two years ago. Yet, beneath all this momentum, a quiet problem is emerging: most companies are asking the wrong questions before they even begin.

Whether it's a retailer wondering which AI vendor to partner with, a B2B enterprise exploring automated procurement workflows, or a direct-to-consumer brand testing AI-powered personalization, the entry point tends to be the same — and it tends to be flawed. Organizations jump to technology selection, platform comparisons, and implementation timelines before they've established a clear strategic foundation. The result is expensive misalignment, underwhelming ROI, and strategies that collapse under the weight of real-world complexity.

Understanding why this happens — and how to correct it — is one of the most valuable things any commerce leader can do in 2025.

What Is Agentic Commerce, and Why Does It Demand Strategic Clarity?

Agentic commerce refers to the use of autonomous AI agents to perform commerce-related tasks with minimal or no human intervention. These agents can browse, compare, negotiate, purchase, and even manage post-purchase logistics on behalf of consumers or businesses. Unlike traditional automation, agentic systems are capable of reasoning, adapting to new information, and executing multi-step workflows across complex environments.

This capability shift is profound. When AI agents begin acting as buyers, intermediaries, or decision-makers within commercial ecosystems, the rules of customer acquisition, loyalty, pricing, and experience design all change simultaneously. That's precisely why strategic clarity isn't optional — it's existential. Without it, companies risk building impressive-sounding agentic capabilities that serve no coherent business goal.

The Most Common Strategic Missteps in Agentic Commerce Planning

To understand what "asking the right questions" actually means, it helps to first examine the wrong ones. These are the questions companies most commonly anchor their agentic commerce strategies around — and why each one leads them astray.

• Which AI vendor offers the best agentic platform? — This question prioritizes tool selection over outcome definition. Without knowing what success looks like for your specific business model, even the most sophisticated platform will underdeliver.
• How quickly can we deploy an AI shopping agent? — Speed-to-market thinking treats agentic commerce as a feature launch rather than a capability transformation. Rapid deployment without strategic grounding tends to produce agents that frustrate customers rather than serve them.
• What are our competitors doing with agentic AI? — Benchmarking against competitors is useful, but making it the primary driver of strategy leads to imitation rather than differentiation. Agentic commerce represents a rare opportunity to define new competitive ground, not simply match what others are doing.
• How do we layer agents on top of our existing commerce stack? — This framing assumes that existing infrastructure is the right starting point. In many cases, legacy architecture is precisely what limits agentic potential, and the better question is whether foundational changes are needed first.

The Right Questions to Ground Your Agentic Commerce Strategy

Reframing the strategic conversation begins with questions that put customer experience, business outcomes, and organizational readiness at the center. Here are the foundational questions that commerce leaders should be asking right now.

What decisions do we want AI agents to make, and which must remain human?

Defining the boundary between automated and human decision-making is perhaps the most important early-stage exercise in agentic commerce planning. Not every customer interaction benefits from full automation. High-stakes purchase decisions, complex service escalations, and emotionally sensitive moments may all require human judgment. Mapping these boundaries clearly prevents both over-automation and under-utilization of agentic capabilities.

How will agentic commerce change what our customers value from us?

When AI agents handle the transactional friction of commerce — price comparison, product discovery, order management — the things that differentiate a brand shift significantly. Customers may increasingly value transparency, trustworthiness, and the quality of the data or recommendations an AI agent relies on. Commerce leaders need to think about brand value in a world where the agent, not the human, is doing the shopping.

Do we have the data infrastructure to support autonomous agent decision-making?

Agentic systems are only as good as the information they can access and act upon. Real-time inventory data, personalized preference modeling, pricing logic, and policy guardrails all need to be accessible, accurate, and structured in ways that AI agents can interpret correctly. Many organizations discover that their data infrastructure is the primary blocker to effective agentic commerce, not their AI technology choices.

What governance and trust frameworks do we need to put in place?

As agents begin making purchasing decisions, managing returns, or negotiating terms on behalf of customers, questions of accountability, transparency, and consumer trust become urgent. Who is responsible when an agent makes a costly error? How do customers know what the agent is doing on their behalf? Building trust frameworks early is not a compliance exercise — it's a competitive differentiator.

Why Forrester's CX Forums Matter for Agentic Commerce Leaders

Forrester's CX Forums, taking place this June, offer commerce and customer experience leaders a structured environment to engage with precisely these foundational questions. Rather than leading with vendor showcases or technology demonstrations, the forums are designed to help organizations anchor their thinking in business outcomes and customer impact first. For companies that have already started down an agentic commerce path — or are preparing to — the opportunity to stress-test strategic assumptions with peers and analysts is invaluable.

The conversations happening at events like Forrester's CX Forums represent the leading edge of agentic commerce thinking. Organizations that engage with these discussions now will be significantly better positioned to make decisions that hold up as the technology, regulation, and customer expectations around agentic AI continue to evolve rapidly.

Building a Foundation That Lasts

Agentic commerce is not a trend to be observed from a safe distance. It is a structural shift in how commercial relationships are formed, managed, and sustained. The organizations that will lead in this space are not necessarily those with the largest AI budgets or the most advanced technology stacks. They are the ones that ask better questions at the start — questions about value, trust, boundaries, and outcomes — and build their agentic strategies on those honest foundations.

The right questions don't slow you down. They ensure that when you move, you're moving in the right direction. In a landscape as fast-moving and consequential as agentic commerce, that distinction makes all the difference.