Agentic AI Commerce Trends

Agentic AI is reshaping the world of commerce. It independently plans, adapts and executes tasks on behalf of the user or business. In shopping, this shift promises faster, more personalized, and efficient customer experiences, from discovery through to returns.

Agentic AI in retail and ecommerce is expected to grow to $175.1 billion by 2030 with 88% of executives saying they plan to to increase AI budgets due to agentic AI. It’s transformative and reshaping commerce where these systems can act autonomously by placing orders, resolving returns or managing stock without human intervention.

Customers are ready too, with 73% expecting brands to use AI to better understand their needs and 36% of customers are open to AI agents making purchases on their behalf, many want transparency and control over how decisions are made.

As adoption accelerates, the most immediate impact will be felt across the entire shopping journey, from how customers discover products to how businesses manage supply chains and returns.

The following five trends highlight where agentic AI is set to reshape commerce in 2025/26 and beyond.

AI Shopping Agents

AI Shopping agents are autonomous programs that act on behalf of consumers where these agents understand context, learn from preferences and make complex decisions through the shopping process.

AI agents play a role at every stage during the buyer journey. They can guide product discovery with personalized suggestions, and reduce cart abandonment by assisting at checkout.

Major retailers are already leading the way. Walmart’s conversational grocery assistant is being adopted and uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to assist shoppers with finding their brand preferences.

Emerging AI shopping platforms like Swap Commerce show how these tools are evolving into fully autonomous agents that can manage the entire shopping journey.

Personalized Commerce Journeys

Agentic AI makes the shopping experience seamless and tailored, using a wide range of data points.

Today’s shoppers expect more than generic recommendations, they want experiences to be tailored to their tastes, budgets and lifestyles.

Swap Commerce’s new agentic system combines a universal product catalog with a memory & preference layer allowing agents to learn from browning behaviour, purchase history and return data.

Integrating structured product data with shopper preferences, Swap’s platform ensures customers have visibility and control, building trust as agents curate dynamic, hyper-personalised experiences that feel seamless from discovery to checkout.

By analysing behaviour across channels and adapting in real time, agentic AI delivers the convenience, relevance, and personalisation modern shoppers demand.

As adoption grows, shoppers are increasingly open to this future but the challenge remains for brands that build trust and transparency while optimising product data so these digital agents consistently deliver value.

Returns & Reverse Logistics

Returns are one of ecommerce’s biggest challenges, costing retailers upwards of $890 billion. Agentic AI transforms the process by:

Automating the returns approvals and issuing customers instantly with RMA numbers
Generating shipping labels and coordinating pickup logistics
Updating inventory systems in real time
Triggering refunds or exchanges without human intervention

Agentic AI adds further intelligence to the process whereby it can flag suspicious activity to reduce return fraud, keeping customers well informed with proactive notifications.

Additionally, Agentic AI analyzes return data to uncover returns patterns, helping retailers improve products and reduce future returns.

For brands looking to put this into practice, Swap Commerce’s returns management solution provides the infrastructure to automate approvals, exchanges, refunds, and shipping in one seamless flow.

By combining agentic AI with clear customer-facing tools, Swap helps retailers cut costs, improve loyalty, and turn returns from a costly burden into a strategic advantage.

Supply Chain Autonomy

Behind the scenes, agentic AI transforming supply chain management. Autonomous systems can:

Forecast demand and adjust inventory across warehouses
Manage stock replenishment dynamically, reducing waste and out-of-stock scenarios
Adapt logistics routes in real time to cut delays

AI agents manage replenishment dynamically, negotiating with suppliers to secure stock and optimize lead times.

Swap’s Commerce’s agentic platform strengthens supply chain autonomy by combining demand planning with cross border operational features.

This agentic approach allows supply chains to factor in not just cost and speed but also sustainability, risk, and resilience, turning logistics into a continuously adapting system that scales reliably across markets.

Customers can see total landed costs, including duties, taxes and prepaid shipping while Swap handles compliance, tax filing and customs to make international sales easier.

With this shift underway, it’s no surprise that the global supply chain AI market is projected to reach $50 billion by 2030, growing at more than 45% annually, highlighting how central agentic AI will be to the future of commerce.

Personalized Product Discovery

Personalized product discovery is becoming more conversational and context-aware. With agentic ai, shoppers can type, speak and upload images to find exactly what they want.

These AI agents pull from real-time availability, pricing, and shipping data while applying memory of past preferences to create curated product lists that evolve throughout the buyer journey.

Agentic discovery depends on optimizing structured product data so it’s machine-readable and transparent, because in a world where AI agents, not just people, decide what products to recommend, attributes and accuracy matter more than eye-catching visuals.

Swap Commerce’s Agentic shopping software ensures products are structured in a way AI agents can easily interpret, across attributes like size, colour, materials while the memory layer of swap’s platform retains shopper preferences to deliver more accurate and personalized results.

In an era where AI agents decide what gets seen, brands that optimize product data for agentic discovery will win both visibility and conversions.

The Future of Agentic AI with Swap Commerce

Agentic AI is no longer a future concept, it is actively reshaping the way commerce works. From autonomous shopping agents that act on behalf of consumers to dynamic product discovery and intelligent supply chain management, AI agents are redefining every stage of the shopping journey.

Market projections show rapid growth, but adoption will only succeed if retailers balance innovation with trust, transparency, and structured data that makes products visible to AI agents. For shoppers, there is more personalization and seamless end-to-end experiences that build loyalty.

Platforms like Swap Commerce demonstrate how agentic AI can already be applied in practice, combining customer-facing intelligence with the operational resilience required for global scale.

Retailers who embrace solutions like Swap today will not only deliver better customer experiences but also gain a decisive competitive edge.

The future of commerce is agentic; now is the time to act.