Agentic Commerce: AI takes over shopping – Google & Co. launch with open standard

Agentic commerce is a new buzzword that is currently defining the future of online retail. Behind it lies a principle whereby AI agents independently take over purchasing processes for you – from product searches and price comparisons to completing purchases.

At the NRF 2026 retail trade show in New York, Google, together with Shopify, Walmart, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and other major players, presented an open standard: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). This allows AI agents to communicate with each other across platforms and process purchases in a fully automated manner—including payment and customer service.

In practice, this means that users will soon be able to shop directly via AI interfaces such as Google Search or Gemini Chat without visiting traditional shopping sites.

Google, for example, plans to integrate “buy buttons” directly into the AI search environment. Retailers, payment providers, and platforms such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal already support the standard.

For companies, this change brings many opportunities—but also challenges:

Especially in the performance marketing and SEO world, it is now important to deal with structured product data management, AI interfaces, and new customer journeys.

Agentic commerce is not only changing the way people shop, but also the role of players in the e-commerce ecosystem. For consumers, this means greater convenience and personalization—but for retailers and brands, it also presents new challenges, such as data sovereignty, transparency, and dependence on big tech platforms.

Financial service providers and analysts also see agentic commerce as a strategic trend for 2026 that could have a lasting impact on payment transactions, customer experience, and platform strategies.

Agentic commerce marks a quantitative and qualitative leap in digital commerce: AI agents go far beyond traditional assistance and are gradually replacing classic purchasing processes. With open standards such as UCP and broad industry support, an e-commerce era is approaching in which AI actively shops for us—more efficiently, more personally, and increasingly autonomously.