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

Why Most Companies Are Starting Agentic Commerce in the Wrong Place

There is a familiar pattern emerging across boardrooms, strategy sessions, and digital transformation roadmaps: companies are rushing to explore agentic commerce without first establishing the foundational questions that should guide every decision. The excitement around AI-powered autonomous agents is entirely understandable — the technology promises to reshape how businesses and consumers interact at a fundamental level. But enthusiasm without the right framework leads to misaligned investments, wasted resources, and strategies that fail to deliver meaningful value.

Agentic commerce refers to the growing ecosystem of AI-driven agents that can autonomously perform complex commercial tasks on behalf of businesses or consumers. These agents can browse product catalogs, compare prices, negotiate terms, place orders, manage returns, and even personalize entire customer journeys — all without direct human input at each step. As the technology matures rapidly, companies across every industry are scrambling to position themselves. Yet the companies that will truly lead in this space are not necessarily those moving fastest. They are the ones asking the most important questions first.

The Danger of Anchoring to the Wrong Starting Point

When organizations begin their agentic commerce journey by asking "What technology do we need?" or "Which vendor should we partner with?", they are already off-course. These are operational questions, and they matter eventually — but they are premature when a company has not yet clearly defined what it is trying to achieve, who it is serving, or how agentic capabilities fit within its broader customer experience vision.

Starting with technology puts the cart before the horse. It leads companies to build solutions in search of problems, rather than designing purposeful strategies that solve real customer and business challenges. This approach also creates organizational fragility: when the technology evolves — and it will evolve quickly — companies anchored in tooling rather than strategic intent are left scrambling to adapt all over again.

The better alternative is to anchor in questions of purpose, value, and customer centricity. This means asking not just what agentic commerce can do, but what it should do, for whom, and why it matters in the context of your specific business model and customer relationships.

The Right Questions to Guide Your Agentic Commerce Strategy

1. What Customer Problems Are We Actually Solving?

Effective agentic commerce strategy begins with a rigorous understanding of customer friction. Where do customers experience frustration, abandonment, or unmet needs in their commerce journey today? Agents should be deployed to resolve genuine pain points — not to demonstrate technological sophistication for its own sake. Companies that can clearly articulate the problems their agentic investments are solving will build solutions with real staying power and measurable ROI.

2. How Much Autonomy Do Our Customers Actually Want?

One of the most underexplored dimensions of agentic commerce is the question of customer trust and desired autonomy. Not all consumers want AI agents making decisions on their behalf. Preferences vary significantly by demographic, purchase category, and cultural context. A customer might be perfectly comfortable with an agent auto-reordering household staples but deeply uncomfortable with an agent selecting a vacation package or a financial product without explicit approval. Understanding these nuances is essential before designing any agentic experience.

3. How Will Agentic Commerce Reshape Our Competitive Differentiation?

If AI agents increasingly mediate the relationship between brands and consumers, then traditional levers of competitive differentiation — brand storytelling, visual design, in-store experience — may become less relevant at the point of purchase. Companies need to ask: what makes us the preferred choice when an agent is doing the choosing? This question has profound implications for pricing strategy, data assets, loyalty program design, and how brands invest in their digital infrastructure.

4. What Data Foundation Do We Need — and Do We Have It?

Agentic systems are only as good as the data that powers them. Companies must honestly assess whether they have the data infrastructure, governance frameworks, and quality standards needed to support reliable, personalized agentic interactions at scale. Gaps in customer data, product data, or operational data will translate directly into poor agent performance, eroded trust, and customer churn. A clear-eyed data audit is a non-negotiable step in any serious agentic commerce strategy.

5. What Are Our Ethical and Regulatory Obligations?

As agents act on behalf of customers or businesses, questions of accountability, transparency, and fairness become critical. Who is responsible when an agent makes a poor decision? How do you ensure agents do not discriminate, manipulate, or operate against the best interests of the customers they serve? Regulatory landscapes around AI are evolving rapidly in the European Union, the United States, and beyond. Companies that build ethical guardrails into their agentic commerce strategies from the outset will be far better positioned to navigate compliance requirements and preserve customer trust over the long term.

Why Forrester's CX Forums Are the Right Place to Find Answers

Forrester's CX Forums, taking place this June, offer a rare opportunity for business and technology leaders to move beyond the hype cycle and engage with the strategic substance of agentic commerce. Rather than showcasing technology for technology's sake, the forums are designed to help attendees develop the right intellectual scaffolding — the questions, frameworks, and mental models — that will guide sound decision-making in a rapidly shifting landscape.

Bringing together Forrester analysts, industry practitioners, and senior executives, the forums create an environment where the hard questions about agentic commerce can be explored with depth and rigor. Sessions are built around real-world challenges, empirical research, and the kind of peer exchange that cuts through vendor noise and surfaces genuinely actionable insights.

For companies that are serious about building an agentic commerce strategy that will hold up over time — not just one that looks good in a slide deck — the forums represent a meaningful investment in getting the foundations right.

The Bottom Line: Strategy Precedes Technology

The companies that will win in agentic commerce are not those with the most sophisticated AI models or the largest technology budgets. They are the companies that take the time to ask the right questions before they commit to answers. They are the companies that understand their customers deeply, define their strategic intent clearly, and build their agentic capabilities on a foundation of trust, data integrity, and genuine value creation.

Agentic commerce is not a feature to be added — it is a fundamental reimagining of how commerce works. That kind of transformation demands more than technical implementation. It demands strategic clarity, and that clarity begins with the courage to pause, reflect, and ask better questions.

• Start with customer problems, not technology solutions.
• Understand how much autonomy your specific customers actually want.
• Rethink competitive differentiation in an agent-mediated world.
• Audit your data infrastructure honestly and comprehensively.
• Build ethical and regulatory safeguards in from the beginning.

If your organization is beginning to explore agentic commerce or is already deep in the planning process, now is the time to stress-test your strategy against these foundational questions. The June Forrester CX Forums provide exactly the environment to do that work — with the expertise, evidence, and peer community to help you get it right.