05/19/2025

Agentic AI Is Quietly Reshaping the eCommerce Funnel

PYMNTS

Maybe browser tabs will become a source of eCommerce nostalgia. Because consumers who once toggled among a dozen browser tabs and comparison-shopping sites are increasingly posing a single question to an LLM such as Perplexity — and pressing “buy” on the answer it returns.

It’s agentic AI at its most promising. That subtle shift in search behavior is forcing merchants to rethink where, and how, they meet shoppers. If an AI agent can compress browsing, selection and checkout into the same dialogue, retailers that sit outside the conversation risk ceding both visibility and sales.

Behind the scenes of that are the software agents empowered not merely to fetch information but to take actions on the customer’s behalf, from adding an item to cart to completing payment. The technology marries an LLM’s knack for understanding natural-language requests with direct hooks into merchant catalogs and payment rails. “What consumers really want is for commerce to happen immediately,” Scott Hendrickson, chief revenue officer of the agentic AI merchant network firmly, said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “People’s time has never been more valuable, and they expect things to be frictionless.”