Agentic Commerce Reality Check
Headlines, Hype, and Hallucinations
I’ve previously described agentic commerce as a “collective hallucination”—a not-so-popular characterization among the pro-agentic crowd.
The most famous examples from history are the Dancing Plague of 1518, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Collective hallucinations don’t arise out of thin air—rather, they manifest within communities subject to intense external stress, high suggestibility, and social contagion.
In late fall 2025, all three converged in retail and ecommerce. Retailers were under growing pressure to squeeze more revenue from retail media networks, even as performance gains became harder to sustain. At the same time, the surging adoption of AI search made the idea of “agentic commerce” sound not just plausible but inevitable—a narrative too compelling for an anxious industry to resist. The Fall conference season echo chamber—amplified on LinkedIn—converted speculation into conviction almost overnight.
The sentiment soon crystallized as every major consulting firm weighed in with its prognosis of retailers’ existential risk:
Kearney (Aug 2025): Agentic Commerce: From Brand Loyalty to Bot Logic
“Agentic commerce will be the most disruptive retail shift since e-commerce. 60% of consumers expect to use AI agents for shopping within the next 12 months. The real threat comes from cross-platform ‘super agents’ that sit between retailers and consumers. For unprepared retailers, the risk is up to 500 bps EBIT erosion from margin compression, traffic dispersion, and brand commoditization.”
BCG (Oct 2025): Agentic Commerce is Redefining Retail – How to Respond
“The advancements in agentic shopping present substantial challenges for traditional retailers, primarily through risks associated with disintermediation… The growth of zero-click search and agent-driven interactions is eroding direct traffic—along with the retailer’s ability to observe, influence, and understand consumer behavior at scale… AI agents’ emphasis on utility weakens traditional brand loyalty, limits cross-selling opportunities, and puts retail media revenues under pressure, all while intensifying the race to the bottom on price and delivery speed.”
McKinsey (Oct 2025): The Agentic Commerce Opportunity: How AI agents are Ushering in a New Era for Consumers and Merchants
“Agentic commerce also threatens to bring about a decline in traditional revenue streams, particularly from advertising. Retail media networks, which rely on ad-based models, could face challenges as consumers shift toward agent-driven experiences that bypass traditional ad channels.”
Bain (Nov 2025): Agentic AI Poised to Disrupt Retail, Even With 50% of Consumers Cautious on Fully Autonomous Purchases
“Of the three types of AI agents – third-party ‘objective’ agents (e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity), on-site retailer agents, and off-site retailer agents – third-party agents threaten to disintermediate retailers most.”
The result was a near-industry-wide belief that agentic commerce would rewrite the rules of retail within months. An ongoing array of headline-grabbing charts and statistics have only added fuel to the fire.
But few of these stats stand up to scrutiny.
So, as with any hallucination, what feels visceral and real in the moment warrants a sober second look.
In this article, we’ll put three recent agentic commerce headline findings to the test.
