The Algorithmic Bazaar

The digital commerce industry has spent the last twenty-five or so years optimizing a single, unit of measurement: the session. We built cathedrals of conversion rate optimization (CRO), obsessed over pixel-perfect hero images, and deployed armies of "customer success" bots that were little more than glorified FAQ routers. We tracked users from the moment they landed on the homepage, watched them struggle through navigational hierarchies, and celebrated when 3% of them actually bought something.

Anywhere else, a 97% failure rate would be grounds for executive termination. In e-commerce, it was the benchmark for success.

We can safely say that the era of the session comes to an end, thanks to conversational and then agentic commerce, which put the "homepage" on life support. What comes more and more into the foreground is the intent, which is what the session was supposed to help derive. And crucially, the entity expressing that intent is increasingly likely to be a machine, not a human.

What we are seeing now is the transition from browser-based commerce, where humans operate interfaces, to agentic Commerce, where AI agents operate APIs. This isn't just a channel expansion like conversational commerce; it is a fundamental inversion of the retail power dynamic. In the browser era, the retailer controlled the environment. In the agentic era, the customer (or their proxy) controls the context. This is quite similar to what happened in the 2000s with the advent of social media. And it will likely be countered by vendors as fast as the power shift back then, e.g., using GEO instead of SEO.

The demise of the search box

Since the rise of Google, the search box was the primary interface for intent. According to findings by Bain and Company, it gets increasingly exchanged by generative AI. 30 to 45 per cent of US consumers already use generative AI for product research and comparison with 17 per cent stating that they start their (holiday online) shopping with ChatGPT, Perplexity and co. This basically says that the traditional search box is becoming obsolete and replaced by the prompt. While this doesn’t look dramatically different, the use is different. Instead of punching in some disjointed keywords, we can now use real phrases to express complex intents, like "I need a sustainable gift under fifty dollars for a coworker who loves cooking, feels premium, and arrives by Friday".

A traditional e-commerce engine likely chokes on this request. It sees "cooking" and shows a spatula, or maybe a pot? It misses "sustainable" because that data is buried in a PDF product description, and it misses "feels premium" because that is a sentiment, not an attribute. An AI agent can parse these constraints and orchestrate a query across the catalog and across vendors. 

If a commerce architecture cannot serve this kind of "headless" request from an AI agent with the same fidelity as a human visiting a homepage, it is effectively closed for business because it is still optimizing for SEO when it should be optimizing for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), which is the art of making your data palatable to an LLM.

To make this work, it needs two key ingredients: Discoverability, which needs to be changed from search centric to language centric. For this, it needs protocols, which are emerging, the Agentic Commerce Protocol ACP from Open AI and the Universal Commerce Protocol UCP from Google, the former more checkout centric and the latter mor centering around interacting entities. All this needs to support the gamut from simple agent to site to brokered agent interactions that include a buyer agent, a seller agent and a broker agent.

The other one is far more basic: interoperability, which is the domain of the model context protocol and the agent 2 agent protocol.

Until around the second half of 2025, OpenAI had plugins, Google had Actions, and none of them talked to each other. Recognizing that fragmentation kills adoption, and that it needs a kind of a “USB port” for commerce, the industry got to its senses and moved toward standardization with the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. 

So, one can say that the basics are sorted now.

The discovery portion is still up for grabs.

This is also the portion where it will be decided whether the customer stays in control or not.

However, …

Salesforce, Cimulate, Microsoft, Algolia and the Discovery Imperative

There is lots of movement in this area. Algolia partnered with Microsoft, Salesforce acquires Cimulate, other vendors build on own agents, protocols and strength. All of them rely on strong ecosystems.

Every single one of them, plus probably some more, are likely to play an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy to gain the upper hand in this emerging market. EEE is basically about achieving vendor lock-in by polluting standards: vendors don’t win by building a better product on a level field but by changing the field so rivals can’t interoperate without copying their proprietary stuff. Having said that, not every extension is evil. Extending a standard can be legitimate innovation if it’s standardized back upstream or remains interoperable. HTTP cookies are an example for this. Extending a standard becomes EEE when the extensions are used, especially by a dominant player, to make competitors incompatible and to shift the ecosystem onto proprietary rails.

What does this mean for the enterprise buyer?

As usual, the path forward is fraught with traps, which makes it important that retailers maintain immediate control of their end points and do not rely on intermediaries. Discovery is migrating off your site, into agent surfaces. So, do not buy the "Agentic Suite" just because a vendor bought a startup last week.

Some recommendations:

Stop thinking in channels and become channel agnostic, or headless, if you will. Your commerce logic from pricing, inventory, to catalog, must be decoupled from the presentation layer. If your Add to Cart function is tied to a JavaScript button on an HTML page, an AI agent cannot trigger it. Even your customer that comes via WhatsApp, will not be able to trigger it. You need an API-first architecture where the "channel" is just an implementation detail.

Structure Your data to embrace GEO. Your catalog is probably a mess. An agent doesn't care about your "whimsical fall vibes" marketing; it cares about structured attributes. Implement a PIM that supports vector embeddings and maybe publish an /llms.txt file on your domain. Invite the agents in; don't make them scrape.

Implement agent-ready security. If an agent is buying, who is checking the ID? We are already seeing prompt injection attacks, where malicious inputs hijack autonomous agents. Adopt the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to ensure you aren't holding the bag for a rogue agent.

Measure the right things. Measuring NPS doesn’t matter for bots. It just doesn't have feelings. Measure goal completion rate (GCR) and similar. If you are optimizing for session time, you are optimizing for a ghost.

Prepare for MyTerms. As I've written previously, the consent banner might have found a successor. We are (hopefully) moving toward IEEE 7012-2025 ("MyTerms"), where the user’s agent negotiates privacy terms with your site automatically. If you don't support this machine-to-machine negotiation, you might be avoided by the privacy-conscious agent.

We are leaving the era of the operator and entering the era of the orchestrator. The new front door is invisible. It is an API call from a user's agent to your agent. For the unprepared retailer, this may very well be an extinction event. For the channel-agnostic retailer, it is the moment where scale can decouple from headcount.

Welcome to 2026. The agents are here. Try not to let them automate your chaos.