AI commerce
An umbrella term for buying and selling where AI plays a central role in discovery, recommendation, or purchase.
What is AI commerce?
AI commerce is an umbrella term covering any buying and selling activity where artificial intelligence plays a central role in helping someone discover, evaluate, or purchase a product. It spans a wide range: a chatbot suggesting a product, an AI search engine summarizing reviews, or a fully autonomous agent completing checkout. All count as AI commerce. The common thread is that AI, not a traditional keyword search or human sales associate, is doing meaningful work somewhere in the shopping journey.
Why it matters
Industry analysts typically position AI commerce as the broad category and "agentic commerce" as its most advanced, autonomous subset (meaning every agentic commerce transaction is AI commerce, but most AI commerce today (an AI Overview showing product options, a chatbot answering "what's the best budget blender") stops at discovery or recommendation rather than autonomous purchase completion. Retail-technology coverage from NRF 2026 and consultancies like McKinsey frame the growth trajectory in stages: AI-assisted search and recommendations first, followed by conversational discovery, then agent-initiated transactions with protocols like ACP and AP2 handling the checkout layer. Because the term is used loosely across vendors, its scope varies by source) some restrict it to consumer retail, while others include B2B procurement and AI-driven ad/marketplace matching.