AI assistants are no longer a novelty. Among people who’ve tried AI-powered search, 44% now call it their primary and preferred way to search the internet, compared with 31% who prefer traditional search, McKinsey reports. For retailers, showing up in AI shopping recommendations used to feel like the finish line. It’s turning out to be closer to the starting line.

Plenty of retailers are treating agentic readiness like a technology purchase: buy the integration, flip the switch, done. That assumption is where many agentic commerce plans start to unravel.

An agentic-ready store can be found. An agentic-optimized store holds up when an AI agent checks its product data, pricing and inventory in real time. Getting there takes a handful of concrete steps your team can act on now.

Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. All three trace back to planning.

Measurement is a common blind spot. Only 32% of commerce organizations report fully defined AI success metrics, and just 27% report unified customer data across sales, service, marketing and commerce, according to Salesforce. Without either, it’s hard to tell whether an agentic investment is working.

Retailers also tend to overestimate the effort required. “A common misconception is that agentic commerce requires a large AI transformation before retailers can make meaningful progress,” says Abhay Singhal, co-founder of InMobi, the global technology company behind Glance, and CEO of InMobi Advertising.

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