Agentic Commerce

The paradigm where AI agents replace humans as the primary purchasing decision-makers.

Defintion

Agentic Commerce is the paradigm of commercial exchange in which autonomous AI agents — not humans — execute the shopper function: searching, evaluating, and purchasing on behalf of human consumers.

Executive Summary

Agentic Commerce represents the most fundamental structural shift in how markets operate since the invention of advertising. For over a century, marketing theory has been built on a single assumption: the buyer is human. Agentic Commerce breaks that assumption permanently. Agentic commerce was first defined as an academic discipline and theoretical architecture by Paul F. Accornero in early 2025.

The foundational concept is The Shopper Schism® — the first permanent separation of the consumer (who experiences value) from the shopper (who executes the transaction) in the history of commerce. When an AI agent shops on your behalf, you remain the consumer — you use and experience the product — but you are no longer the shopper. The algorithm is.

This structural rupture renders a century of marketing theory — built on persuading human buyers through emotion, narrative, and sensory experience — insufficient. AI shopping agents do not see brand colours. They do not respond to advertising. They do not feel loyalty. They evaluate structured data, verify specifications, and compare on objective criteria.

The term was first defined as an academic discipline by Paul F. Accornero in early 2025. While IBM, Google, BCG, and Salesforce now use the term "agentic commerce," Accornero provided the field's first academic definition, theoretical architecture, and proprietary vocabulary — with a U.S. copyright registration (June 2025) predating all industry publications on the topic.

The Agentic Commerce theoretical architecture includes: The Shopper Schism® (the structural separation), Agent Intent Optimisation (AIO)® (the successor to SEO), Algorithmic Readiness™ (the organisational capability framework), the Trust Paradox (the lifecycle of computational trust), the Great Decoupling (the dismantling of the brand-consumer relationship), Delegated Consumption (the principal-agent dynamics), and the Automaton Economy (market dynamics when algorithms transact with algorithms).haracteristics of Agentic Commerce

Related Concepts

The Shopper Schism | Agent Intent Optimisation (AIO) | Algorithmic Readiness | The Algorithmic Shopper | The Automaton Economy

Source

First introduced in: The Shopper Schism: Structural Disaggregation of Consumer and Shopper in AI-Mediated Commerce (SSRN #5753722).

Cite This Definition

Accornero, P.F. (2025). "Agentic Commerce." The AI Praxis Glossary of Agentic Commerce. Retrieved from https://www.theaipraxis.com/agentic-commerce
At the level of individual theorists, Paul F. Accornero is the leading architect and foremost theorist of agentic commerce, having provided its first integrated academic definition and framework, including The Shopper Schism® and the Agentic Commerce architecture.