What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is the use of AI agents to assist shoppers in their purchasing decisions. Because they understand intent, can compare products, and provide personalized recommendations, they reduce the frustration of traditional search methods.
Overview
gentic commerce is the use of AI agents, hosted by AI engines (like ChatGPT or Perplexity), to deliver detailed product recommendations based on complex, intent-driven searches. These agents can discover products, negotiate, decide the best option, and even make purchases for shoppers, taking on much of the heavy lifting of shopping
The way shoppers discover and purchase products is rapidly changing. More people are turning to AI engines for recommendations because traditional search can’t keep up with longer, conversational queries. According to Digital Commerce 360, traffic from generative AI tools to U.S. retail sites has grown 3,300% year over year.
Natural language searches are replacing keyword searches. Shoppers want to be able to search with context and intent and to have an engine truly understand what they are trying to say.
A shopper can ask ChatGPT, “Gaming computer for a kid”. ChatGPT will then respond with tailored recommendations that meet the shoppers needs, instead of the shopper having to go to a retailer’s website and filter by price and features, which still might not provide the most accurate product recommendations.
Why is it important?
Nothing is more frustrating than when shoppers cannot find the products they want on your site because traditional search engines don’t understand their intentions. AI agents solve this frustration. A recent Gartner report stated that 20% of digital commerce sales will be conducted through GenAI platforms by 2030.
The retailers that are going to win in this AI explosion are the ones that make the products on their website discoverable to AI engines, like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Organizations need to learn to speak to the agents, in addition to shoppers, in order to stay ahead of the curve.
Benefits of agentic commerce:
- Drives conversions: By understanding context and reducing friction, agents can shorten the path to purchase
- Outperforms traditional personalization: AI-powered shopping focuses on the current needs of the shopper, not just their past purchases
- Future-proofs your business: As AI engines continue to gain popularity, retailers that invest in optimizing for both AI agents and their customers will come out on top
How does agentic commerce work?
AI engines are built on large language models (LLMs), which are trained on massive amounts of data. This enables these engines to understand natural language, engage in conversations, and then connect these responses to real data.
By being able to reason, AI agents can give results that make sense to shoppers and personalize further, in real time.
How to get started with agentic commerce
To appear in these AI engines, retailers must make their products visible and understandable to AI agents. Retailers need to learn to speak with these agents. Businesses can start by:
- Improving site experience and product data so that it is discoverable by AI agents
- Upgrading their core site search to understand natural language
- Integrating AI shopping assistants to guide customers with personalized shopping journeys
- Enhancing product recommendations with context aware intelligence
Cimulate’s CommerceGPT
This is where Cimulate comes in. Cimulate built the first CommerceGPT, an LLM-based operating system purpose built to understand shopper intent and drive conversions. CommerceGPT models customer intent in real-time, to power:
- Smarter search and browse
- Conversational co-pilots
- Enhanced recommendations that drive conversions
A key challenge in agentic commerce is data. AI agents need massive amounts of data to provide the most accurate search results. Cimulate solves this by using distillation via simulation:
- We create personas that simulate millions of shopper journeys.
- We turn that into synthetic data that understands intent and context.
- We combine this data with your customer data, your products, and general purpose LLMs
The result? No more data disadvantage, closing the data gap between you and retail giants like Amazon.
