Generative artificial intelligence (AI) increased its role in ecommerce for Prime Day in 2025, as AI traffic surged above 2024 levels — and now, online retailers will see how far agentic commerce has come as AI platforms present their discovery and checkout solutions to shoppers for the end-of-year holiday season.
It is clear that agentic commerce, where specialized AI models perform actions on behalf of shoppers, is still young. However, tech companies including Alphabet, Perplexity, OpenAI and Salesforce all have agentic solutions out in the wild ahead of Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. In some cases, these companies have also shared where they see agentic commerce technology heading.
As was the case in other AI fields that preceded agentic commerce, marketing, sales pitches and other promises can blur technical definitions. However, there are frameworks for evaluating exactly what current offerings can do — and what they do not do yet. These are the levels of agentic AI performance, particularly as they apply to ecommerce, that tech leaders see as they look ahead.
What are the levels of agentic commerce capability?
First of all, not every ecommerce site chatbot powered by AI represents an example of agentic commerce in action.
At Salesforce, which has openly shared its own prescribed levels of agentic AI maturity, many chatbots and co-pilots operate at a so-called “Level-0,” which is a precursor to agentic AI. In Salesforce’s framework, agentic AI at the first of four levels is not achieved until agents begin assisting human users by retrieving information and recommending actions based on that information. On-site customer service agents for ecommerce sites may meet this bar in some cases, relaying return policies or otherwise offering next steps.
At subsequent levels of development, agents display additional capabilities. For instance, Salesforce associates second-level agent AI with managing and executing tasks outside of a chat with other apps or programs, albeit within a siloed environment.
Moving on to the third level, agents operate across multiple workflows, coordinating processes with multiple areas of domain specialization and high levels of effectiveness. Beyond that level at a fourth tier, Salesforce associates this highest state of performance with operating, communicating and coordinating with other agents from outside systems. For a shopper, that might ultimately involve managing shopping lists, executing orders across multiple merchants and even communicating with carriers if delivery needs change or problems emerge, updating the customer in real time as issues are addressed.
Where AI agents are at now in ecommerce
An October report published by Boston Consulting Group roughly follows Salesforce’s framework in BCG analysts’ assessment that current agentic commerce capabilities fall into the early second tier in a four-tier progression. Those authors characterize this state of agents with the ability to execute purchases in chats, without sending shoppers to ecommerce sites outside of the chat experience. That flow alone has implications for customer experience, creating an intermediary between merchants and their customers.
“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,” BCG’s analysts wrote.
In fact, online retailers already find themselves face-to-face with the early stages associated with Google Zero for ecommerce. That term is associated with websites no longer being able to rely on traditional search engines to pass along organic referral traffic to product listings and web pages. In-experience agentic checkout options such as those offered by ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity have the potential to exacerbate challenges for online merchants. Notably, Amazon and Perplexity already find themselves at odds in a legal disagreement over whether or not Perplexity’s Comet web browser should be able to access and navigate Amazon.com.
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