With OpenAI launching Instant Checkout this fall and Amazon rolling out AI-powered shopping tools, Canadian businesses face a critical window to understand the evolution in ecommerce that’s coming next.
Agentic commerce, where AI agents act on behalf of people and businesses to research, negotiate, and complete transactions, is beginning to take hold and is set to accelerate fast.
Mastercard’s new Agentic Commerce Report projects this shift will drive a $1.7 trillion market by 2030.
The full report here:
Craig Reiff, Senior Vice President of Core Payments at Mastercard, shared some early adopters of agentic commerce from the report.
Early Adopters of Agentic Commerce
- Walmart
- Walmart is consolidating numerous bots into four AI “super agents”— for shoppers; employees; developers; and suppliers, sellers and advertisers.
- For customers, the shopping agent Sparky moves beyond product recommendations to do things like reorders, party planning and even recipe ideas based on fridge photos.
- Employees and partners will get agents to handle leave requests, pull sales data, onboard sellers, manage orders and build and test new tools.
- The goal is to reduce friction across shopping and operations and push e-commerce to 50% of sales within five years.
- Amazon & Shopify
- Amazon and Shopify use agentic AI to equip shopping assistants to learn from browsing history, cart behavior and even abandoned checkouts.
- Adapting to each customer, they suggest complementary products, predict reorder needs and adjust suggestions based on real-time feedback.
- According to Shopify’s 2025 Retail Report, stores that use AI-driven personalization see 25% higher average order values and 19% lower return rates.
“If we think about what agentic commerce is, the starting point of what we have today is really generative AI. When we think about the usage today, many users using ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot, it’s generally asking for information, receiving information back. Really where it ends is around action,” said Reiff.
When we think about today’s world, generative AI is more about recommendations or predicting behaviours. What agentic commerce really starts to do is take those recommendations and move them into actions. Right now, generative AI is mostly about information and recommendations.
When we think about the next stage—agentic commerce—it takes that information and moves it into action, explained Reiff.
“It’s really the evolution: bringing together the world of e-commerce as we know it with generative AI to automate the purchasing process,” he said.
The first stage is what we’re in now, which is a lot of prototyping and piloting. That’s expected to continue over the next couple of years, through about 2027. The next phase—the back half or last couple of years of this decade—will be when the prototyping starts to complete, and we start to see winners and losers. These will be the tools and platforms users are actually interacting with. And then, roughly 2030 onwards, it becomes more native—more everyday use.
“We’re still in those early phases of prototyping. What we’re seeing across ecosystem partners is a lot of testing: what’s working, what’s not, and the basic fundamentals required. Something as simple as the discoverability of your goods and services—today consumers search your website, but now you have to start thinking about how agents will search. It’s a different language,” he explained.
User experience is extremely important, not just for the agent, but for users. And of course, everything around safety, security, and trust. These are the things the industry is learning in this first phase.
Security is at the core. And when we think about agentic commerce, it will continue to be at the core.
“You’re looking at security from a few different angles. First, authenticating you and me as users of the agent. Second, authenticating the agent itself. Is the agent or bot I’m interacting with legitimate? And then ensuring that when an agent makes a transaction, it’s actually intended by the user,” added Reiff.
“Security has always been a core tenet in payments, and that continues in the world of agentic commerce. Many of the safety standards and frameworks Mastercard has put in place for payments overall will continue into this space.”
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