Right Questions to Ask About Agentic Commerce

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

There is a new kind of urgency in the boardroom. Executives across retail, financial services, and B2B industries are rushing to articulate their agentic commerce strategies, eager to demonstrate that their organizations are not being left behind by the AI revolution. The problem is that the majority of these conversations begin with the wrong questions. Instead of asking what agentic commerce should accomplish for their customers and their business, companies tend to ask which vendors to evaluate, which platforms to integrate, or how quickly they can ship a pilot. The result is a strategy built on assumptions rather than insight — and that gap is costly.

Agentic commerce is not simply another technology trend to be managed through a procurement checklist. It represents a fundamental shift in how transactions are discovered, initiated, negotiated, and completed. When AI agents can act autonomously on behalf of consumers and businesses — browsing catalogs, comparing prices, placing orders, managing subscriptions, and resolving disputes — the entire architecture of commerce changes. If your strategic planning process is not accounting for that shift at the foundational level, you are likely optimizing the wrong things.

What Agentic Commerce Actually Means for Your Business

Before your organization can ask the right questions, it needs a shared and grounded understanding of what agentic commerce means in practice. At its core, agentic commerce refers to AI-powered systems — agents — that can perceive context, make decisions, and take actions across commerce workflows with minimal or no human intervention at each step. These agents can act on behalf of a shopper looking for the best price on a specific item, a procurement officer managing a complex supply chain order, or a business automating its reorder cycles based on inventory signals.

The implications of this are wide-ranging. Traditional conversion funnels, which were designed around human attention and human decision-making, may no longer apply in the same way. Brand loyalty becomes harder to sustain when an AI agent is optimizing purely on price or availability. Customer data strategies need to account for machine-to-machine interactions, not just human browsing behavior. Personalization, which has long been a competitive differentiator, takes on new dimensions when the "customer" placing the order is itself an algorithm.

The Danger of Starting With Technology Instead of Strategy

One of the most common mistakes companies make when approaching agentic commerce is treating it primarily as a technology implementation problem. They focus on which large language model to use, how to build or buy an agent orchestration layer, or what APIs they need to expose. While these are legitimate operational questions, they are not strategic starting points.

Starting with technology leads organizations to build solutions in search of problems. They create impressive demos that do not map to real customer needs or business outcomes. They invest in infrastructure before they have clarity on governance, trust, or accountability — all of which are critical when autonomous agents are making decisions that affect real customers and real revenue. And they often discover too late that the agent they built reinforces existing friction rather than eliminating it.

The more productive starting point is a set of strategic questions that force clarity about value, risk, and readiness before a single line of code is written.

The Right Questions to Ask About Agentic Commerce

Getting anchored in the right questions is not a soft exercise in navel-gazing. It is how organizations avoid expensive misdirection and build commerce strategies that are durable even as the technology continues to evolve rapidly. Here are the kinds of questions that should be driving your agentic commerce conversations:

What problems are we actually solving? Agentic commerce should be grounded in real friction points — for customers, for operations, or for partners. What are the most painful and costly points in your current commerce journey, and would autonomous agents meaningfully address them?
Who are the agents acting for, and whose interests do they serve? An agent working on behalf of a consumer has a different set of obligations than one working on behalf of your business. Understanding this distinction shapes everything from how you design the agent to how you communicate about it.
How do you establish trust in agentic interactions? Trust is not automatic. Customers and partners need to understand what an agent can and cannot do, how its decisions are made, and what recourse exists when things go wrong. What is your trust and transparency framework?
What does governance look like when agents make consequential decisions? When an AI agent commits to a contract, processes a return, or declines a transaction, who is accountable? How do you audit agentic decisions, and what escalation paths exist?
How does agentic commerce change your data strategy? Agent-driven interactions generate different signals than human-driven ones. How will you collect, interpret, and act on data from agentic commerce flows?
What does the competitive landscape look like when agents are the buyers? If AI agents are optimizing for your customers, how do you ensure your products and services are discoverable, preferred, and selected? What does brand strategy mean in an agentic environment?

Why Forrester's CX Forums Matter for Agentic Commerce Leaders

Forrester's CX Forums, taking place this June, offer a timely and structured opportunity for business and technology leaders to get anchored in exactly these kinds of questions. Rather than leading with vendor showcases or technology demonstrations, the Forums are designed to help practitioners cut through the noise and develop the strategic clarity they need to move forward with confidence.

The agentic commerce conversation at Forrester's CX Forums is grounded in research, analyst insight, and peer exchange — the combination that is most useful when you are navigating genuinely new territory. For leaders who are responsible for commerce strategy, customer experience design, or digital transformation, this is the kind of setting where the right questions get asked and the frameworks for answering them begin to take shape.

Building an Agentic Commerce Strategy That Lasts

Agentic commerce is not a feature you ship or a quarter-long initiative you complete. It is an evolving capability that will reshape how your organization creates and captures value in commerce over the next several years. The organizations that will lead in this space are not necessarily the ones that move fastest. They are the ones that move most deliberately — starting with the right questions, building toward outcomes that matter, and maintaining the governance and trust frameworks that make autonomous commerce sustainable at scale.

If your current agentic commerce conversations are dominated by technology selection and build-versus-buy debates, it is time to take a step back. Anchor your strategy in the questions that drive real clarity: who the agents serve, what trust looks like, how accountability works, and what success actually means for your customers and your business. That is where durable agentic commerce strategy begins.