The customer who just bought your product may not be human.
While that may sound like science fiction, it’s the emerging reality of commerce in today’s “AI everything” world. For brands and retailers alike, this shift forces a fundamental rethinking of how your products are discovered, evaluated and purchased.
Welcome to the age of agentic commerce, now with a foundational technology backbone via the recently announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) from Google. Here’s what marketers need to know now:
E-commerce is shifting from AI-assisted to AI-executed
Like most things AI-related these days, this evolution is moving fast. Really fast. It’s not just hype; it’s being formalized by real protocols, not just “now with AI!”-type features.
Today, the cutting-edge AI systems in browsers and assistants can complete full transactional flows. The difference matters here. Early commerce AI operated with the human in the loop. You asked, it suggested. Modern agentic commerce, supported by emerging open standards, enables autonomous execution within pre-set guardrails (think spending limits, brand preferences or approval thresholds).
That said, consumer behavior is still catching up, so for the foreseeable future, most AI-enabled purchases will blend human intent with algorithmic assistance.
What the advent of zero–click commerce means for marketers
The next frontier removes the click entirely. But the real story isn’t just that so-called zero-click commerce is on its way; it’s how it’s being built.
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), announced at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference in January, creates a shared language for AI agents to interact with retailers. Shopify, Target, Walmart and Stripe are already on board.
Why does this matter? Because without standards like UCP, every AI agent would need custom integration with every retailer. That’s expensive, fragile and hard to scale. UCP collapses that complexity into a common layer that AI agents can use to discover products, check inventory, process payments and complete checkout across platforms without involving an army of engineers.
This isn’t just about convenience for shoppers. It’s infrastructure that makes agentic commerce work at scale.
For something like UCP to really gain traction, though, two prerequisites must be in place:
Trust: Users need to feel like they can actually trust AI agents with payment credentials and a certain level of decision-making authority. Authentication, tokenization (i.e., secure payment protocols that keep consumers’ stored payment information safe) and audit trails are still evolving, so consumer trust itself remains a variable.
Control: We’re going to increasingly see consumers and regulators demand clear guardrails — about parameters including budgets, preferred brands, spend thresholds and override options — when it comes to zero-click commerce. Nobody wants their AI buying a boat without asking.
Standards such as UCP help by embedding security and consent into the commerce stack itself rather than leaving it to duct tape and hope. (Hope already has its work cut out for itself.)
How AI-executed online shopping could affect e-commerce logistics
All of these new developments have a direct business implication: This type of architecture/protocol could drive more visits/sales and a higher volume of shipments.
The data backs this up. According to Adobe, generative AI traffic to retail sites surged nearly 4,700% year-over-year in 2025. Additionally, of consumers surveyed by Adobe, 38% say they have used some form of generative AI when shopping online.
If routine purchases are increasingly handled by agents, fulfillment patterns may shift. Vendors could see more frequent smaller shipments rather than larger aggregated carts. This would ramp up the total parcels processed and delivered.
The good news? AI can help on the backend too. (How convenient.)
Smarter demand forecasting and automated fulfillment management promise to improve throughput and reduce error rates. If the business can manage the logistics, these forces could create a virtuous cycle: easier discovery, faster checkout, more automated fulfillment.
How retailers and marketers can adapt to AI-assisted e-commerce now
As AI agents increasingly initiate commerce, brands are going to have to adapt to a whole new era of e-commerce. If everything keeps moving as fast as it has been, that era might arrive before you finish reading this. (No pressure.)
Here’s how to get ready:
- Embrace standards like UCP early. Being early to adopt emerging protocols can reduce integration costs. First-mover advantage is real here.
- Stress-test fulfillment for new demand patterns. AI-driven demand may shift orders toward more frequent, smaller baskets. Scenario planning, not just capacity planning, is key.
- Cultivate brand equity in an agentic world. Brand preference still matters, but now it’s also important to address and express it through data and signals that AI agents evaluate. Think of it this way: Be a brand that AI defaults to; it’s the new loyalty program.
Why marketers need to learn the “new language” of e-commerce
Again, all of this is not a distant possibility. E-commerce is being rearchitected around conversational intent and agent-based execution right now.
Standards such as the Universal Commerce Protocol aren’t just technical innovations. They’re the frameworks that will serve as the underlying foundation for future AI commerce systems by aligning language, security and functionality.
The question is not if but how you position your brand to be chosen in that context.
After all, your next customer might be an algorithm.
Want to learn more and continue the conversation? Rise can help.
