The announcement of OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Platform (ACP) has caused a bit of a stir in both tech and retail industries. This may mark the start of a complete rewrite of how digital commerce operates.
For months, business leaders have been wrestling with the gap between AI’s hype and its reality. The generative wave promised transformation but delivered mostly templates, emails, and cloned marketing content. Many organisations have invested heavily in pilots, licences, and training, only to discover that “adding AI” rarely equates to real change.
Now, with ACP, OpenAI seems to be signalling that generative AI was never the destination. It was the prelude to something much bigger: a world where intelligent agents transact, negotiate, and fulfil human intent without a traditional user interface.
The first wave of AI adoption has shown how quickly excitement can turn into fatigue. Tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and their many clones have been brilliant at generating content, but poor at delivering meaningful differentiation.
What we gained in speed, we lost in originality.
Feed enough prompts into a chatbot and it will produce an infinite supply of convincing but lifeless words. The internet is now drowning in what many have started to call AI slop.
This happened because most organisations are treating AI as a tool rather than as infrastructure. They are using it to do existing work faster and this trumping not only quality but the reason why we may do the work in the first place.
That is about to change. The arrival of systems like the Agentic Commerce Platform marks a shift from automation to orchestration. Instead of asking a tool to generate an output, we begin defining outcomes and letting coordinated agents achieve them.
An agentic system is a network of intelligent components that can reason, take action, and collaborate. One agent might write a product description, another could verify compliance, a third might personalise pricing for a returning customer, and a fourth could handle fulfilment logistics. Each has a narrow remit, but together they form a complete commercial ecosystem capable of operating with minimal human supervision.
In this model, the role of people shifts from operators to orchestrators. Leaders define goals and boundaries, while the system interprets intent and executes autonomously.
This moment has strong parallels with the early days of online retail. In the 1990s, e-commerce looked clunky, slow, and unsafe. Very few believed customers would shop online. The technology felt unfinished and the audience unready. But within a decade, it became the default mode of global trade.
The same scepticism surrounds agentic AI today. Many businesses are waiting for proof that it works before committing. But by the time that proof is obvious, the infrastructure will already be owned by others. The danger is not in moving too soon. It is in assuming there is still time to wait.
Just as the web once made information searchable, ACP hints at a future where commerce becomes actionable. Instead of browsing pages, users may soon express an intent; “I need a new winter jacket”, and the platform will negotiate, select, and purchase the best option automatically.
This redefines what a digital product even is. The focus shifts from designing user journeys to designing agent interactions. The brand experience will be less about visual design and more about how your agents behave, cooperate, and deliver results on behalf of your customers.
In that sense, ACP does not “kill” e-commerce. It completes its evolution. The interface era, where customers clicked through screens to complete a purchase, gives way to the intent era, where the transaction happens through a trusted network of agents acting for both buyer and seller.
The arrival of the Agentic Commerce Platform makes clear that AI is not a feature. It is becoming the new foundation of digital business. The same way websites once became essential for sales, and mobile apps became essential for engagement, agentic systems will soon become essential for operation.
Generative AI may have dominated headlines, but really this is about coordination, autonomy, and scale. ACP shows what happens when those capabilities converge: an economy where intent becomes currency and where the infrastructure of commerce can think for itself.
The hype around AI may be fading, but the transformation it signals is only just beginning.
Welcome to the agentic age of commerce.