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

Why Most Companies Are Starting Their Agentic Commerce Strategy in the Wrong Place

The race toward agentic commerce is accelerating at a pace that few business leaders anticipated even two years ago. Across industries, companies are investing heavily in AI-driven agents that can autonomously browse, recommend, negotiate, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. Yet despite the enthusiasm and the capital being deployed, a significant number of organizations are making a critical strategic error from the very beginning: they are asking the wrong questions.

According to insights from Forrester Research, companies that jump headfirst into agentic commerce planning often anchor their strategy around technology capabilities rather than customer outcomes, business value, or long-term competitive positioning. This misalignment leads to wasted investment, fragmented implementation, and missed opportunities. Getting the foundational questions right is not a minor detail — it is the difference between a transformative commerce strategy and an expensive experiment that fails to deliver results.

What Is Agentic Commerce, and Why Does It Matter Now?

Agentic commerce refers to the use of autonomous AI agents — software systems capable of perceiving their environment, making decisions, and taking actions — to facilitate or complete commercial transactions. Unlike traditional e-commerce automation, which follows rigid, pre-programmed rules, agentic systems can adapt, learn, and act with a degree of independence that mirrors human decision-making.

These agents can perform a wide range of commerce-related tasks: researching products, comparing prices across platforms, understanding complex user preferences, placing orders, managing returns, and even negotiating terms with suppliers. For consumers, this means a dramatically simplified shopping experience. For businesses, it represents both an enormous opportunity and a profound challenge to existing revenue and engagement models.

The urgency around agentic commerce is not theoretical. Major technology platforms, retail giants, and financial services companies are already deploying early versions of these systems. Businesses that fail to develop a coherent strategy now risk being outpaced as customer behavior shifts and competitors gain first-mover advantages in agent-friendly commerce infrastructure.

The Common Trap: Starting With Technology Instead of Strategy

When leadership teams first encounter agentic commerce, the conversation almost inevitably gravitates toward the technology itself. Which AI platform should we use? How do we integrate agents into our existing tech stack? Should we build in-house or partner with a vendor? These are legitimate questions — but they are premature if asked before more foundational strategic questions have been addressed.

Forrester's research highlights a pattern in which organizations anchor their agentic commerce roadmap around vendor capabilities or internal IT constraints rather than around the core business and customer problems they are trying to solve. This approach produces systems that are technically functional but strategically misaligned. The result is often an agent that can complete a transaction but does so in a way that erodes margin, damages brand trust, or fails to integrate with broader customer relationship management goals.

The Right Questions to Anchor Your Agentic Commerce Strategy

Shifting from a technology-first to a strategy-first mindset requires asking a different set of questions. The following areas represent the most critical starting points for any organization serious about building sustainable agentic commerce capabilities.

1. What Customer Problem Are We Actually Solving?

The most powerful agentic commerce implementations are designed around genuine customer friction points. Before evaluating any technology, teams should conduct deep customer research to understand where autonomous assistance would add the most meaningful value. Is the problem one of discovery — helping customers find the right product across a fragmented market? Is it one of decision fatigue — reducing the cognitive burden of complex purchasing choices? Or is it a post-purchase challenge, such as simplifying returns and exchanges? The specificity of the problem definition will determine the design, scope, and success metrics of your agentic system.

2. How Will Agentic Commerce Change Our Revenue Model?

Agentic systems fundamentally alter how value is created and captured in commerce. When an AI agent makes purchasing decisions on behalf of a consumer, traditional marketing levers — brand advertising, in-store displays, emotional impulse triggers — may lose their effectiveness. Businesses need to ask how their pricing strategy, margin structure, and customer acquisition costs will be affected when an agent, rather than a human, is making the final call. Companies that do not address this question early will find their existing revenue assumptions undermined as agent adoption scales.

3. What Trust and Governance Frameworks Do We Need?

Agentic commerce introduces significant new dimensions of risk around data privacy, consumer consent, and accountability. When an AI agent makes a purchase on a customer's behalf and something goes wrong — an unauthorized charge, a misunderstood preference, a privacy breach — who is responsible? Organizations must develop clear governance frameworks that define the boundaries of agent authority, establish transparency with customers about how their agents operate, and create meaningful accountability structures. Trust is the foundation of commerce, and agentic systems must be designed to earn and maintain it.

4. How Do We Measure Success Differently?

Traditional e-commerce metrics such as conversion rate, cart abandonment, and average order value may not adequately capture the performance of agentic commerce systems. Organizations need to develop new measurement frameworks that account for agent efficiency, decision quality, long-term customer lifetime value, and the experience of customers whose agents are acting on their behalf. Redefining success metrics before deployment ensures that optimization efforts are pointed in the right direction.

Why Forrester's CX Forums Are the Right Place for This Conversation

Forrester's CX Forums, taking place this June, are designed precisely for business leaders who are trying to navigate complex, fast-moving strategic challenges like agentic commerce. Rather than focusing primarily on technology showcases or vendor demonstrations, the forums are structured to help attendees develop the strategic clarity and analytical frameworks needed to make well-grounded decisions.

Sessions at the forums address the foundational questions that organizations need to answer before they can effectively act on agentic commerce opportunities. Attendees can expect to engage with Forrester analysts who have spent years studying the intersection of customer experience, commerce technology, and AI strategy. Peer networking with other business leaders who are navigating similar challenges provides additional perspective that is difficult to replicate in any other setting.

The Competitive Cost of Getting the Questions Wrong

The window for thoughtful, strategic engagement with agentic commerce is narrowing. As consumer adoption of AI assistants grows and as major platforms build agent-friendly infrastructure, the structural conditions of digital commerce will shift rapidly. Companies that invest now in answering the right foundational questions will be positioned to move quickly and with confidence when they deploy. Those that rush to implementation without strategic clarity will find themselves rebuilding expensive systems or, worse, ceding market position to more strategically coherent competitors.

Agentic commerce is not just another technology trend to monitor from the sidelines. It is a structural shift in how commerce operates, and the organizations that understand this will approach it with the seriousness and discipline it deserves — starting not with the answer, but with the right questions.