Building for the Agentic Era: Key Takeaways from our Shoptalk Fringe Event

This week, alongside Shoptalk Spring in Las Vegas, we brought together leaders from Google Cloud, PayPal, EPAM, and Commerce to unpack one of the biggest shifts in digital commerce: the rise of the agentic era.

The conversation explored how AI agents are fundamentally reshaping how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products – and what brands need to do now to stay competitive.

From browsing to matching: a new commerce paradigm

A central theme throughout the session was that traditional ecommerce journeys are being compressed — and in some cases, rewritten entirely.

“Agents don’t browse like humans. Agents match… agentic commerce is basically squeezing that journey down to just a few touchpoints.”

— Kapil Dabi, America’s Market Lead, Global Industries & Solutions, Retail & Consumer, Google Cloud 

Instead of users navigating multiple sites and channels, AI agents can synthesize vast amounts of data instantly – surfacing the most relevant products and even completing transactions on behalf of the consumer.

This shift marks a move from search-driven commerce to intent-driven commerce, where structured data and context become the deciding factors in visibility and conversion.

Data is the defining factor (more than ever)

If there was one consistent message across every speaker, it was this: data readiness is the foundation of agentic commerce.

Sharon Gee, SVP Product, AI at Commerce, highlighted the risk for brands that aren’t prepared. 

“If you don’t have structured product data… you’re never going to be able to answer the question.”  

— Sharon Gee, SVP Product, AI at Commerce

In an agentic world, it’s not enough to have basic product feeds. Brands need:

• Real-time inventory and pricing

• Rich product attributes and contextual descriptions

• Fulfillment, returns, and logistics data

• First-party behavioral and loyalty data

• Even third-party signals (e.g., reviews, forums)

In summary:

“Agents are customers too now… brands have to think about how to give data to the robots.”  

— Sharon Gee, SVP Product, AI at Commerce

Introducing the infrastructure: UCP and the agentic stack

At the heart of the discussion was Google’s newly launched Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) – an open standard designed to enable seamless, end-to-end agentic transactions across platforms.

“[UCP is simply] a handshake which can control the entire customer journey – from discovery to checkout – while giving the power back to the brand.” 

— Kapil Dabi, America’s Market Lead, Global Industries & Solutions, Retail & Consumer, Google Cloud 

Unlike traditional marketplaces, UCP allows merchants to remain the merchant of record, maintaining ownership of the customer relationship while enabling transactions directly within AI interfaces like Gemini. 

Speakers emphasized that this isn’t just another channel – it’s a new layer of infrastructure that sits across both first-party (brand-owned) and third-party (AI-driven) experiences.

Brian Gilmore, Global Head of Commerce GTM at EPAM, explained that this differentiation is crucial to understanding that this shift doesn’t require brands to rip up and rebuild their existing tech stacks. 

“You don’t need to replatform, if your architecture is composable, you can connect what you’ve already built into these new agentic ways of selling.”

— Brian Gilmore, Global Head of Commerce GTM, EPAM

Instead, the opportunity lies in connecting existing systems into this new layer, enabling brands to move faster without the cost and complexity of starting from scratch.

Discovery is changing, fast

AI-driven discovery is already happening, particularly in high-consideration categories like furniture, electronics, and fashion. From image-based search to conversational queries, consumers are increasingly relying on AI to narrow down choices and make decisions faster.

But, as Gee noted, this creates new challenges. 

“AI’s gatekeepers have scaled quickly, but they weren’t designed to be retail-led. They are still learning the business. So, the burden falls on brands to feed them the right data or risk being invisible to shoppers”

— Sharon Gee, SVP Product, AI at Commerce

This creates both a risk and an opportunity: brands that structure and distribute their data effectively will win visibility in these emerging interfaces.

Payments, identity, and trust in an agentic world

Beyond discovery and checkout, the panel also explored the complexity of payments when agents are involved.

“When an agent comes into play, how do you know who the agent represents? And when something goes wrong, who holds the liability?”

— Nixon Dinh, Director Of Product, Agentic Commerce, PayPal 

Dinh stressed that establishing trust, identity, and authorization in agent-led transactions will be critical – extending existing frameworks like KYC/KYB into the agent ecosystem.

Where brands should start

For many in the room, the big question was: what do we actually do next?

The consensus was clear:

1. Get your data in order

2. Leverage existing partners (don’t rebuild everything)

3. Start small, but start now

“Start small – that’s okay. But you have to start. Agentic commerce is here, and it’s going to stay.”  

— Kapil Dabi, America’s Market Lead, Global Industries & Solutions, Retail & Consumer, Google Cloud 

And Kapil reinforced a second time that, most importantly, brands don’t need to replatform to participate. Much of the capability can be unlocked through existing ecosystems and integrations.

A $3 trillion opportunity

The scale of the opportunity is enormous. The panel cited estimates of a $3 trillion global market shift, with $1 trillion in North America alone.

But more than the numbers, this moment represents a structural shift in how commerce works.

The brands that win in the agentic era will be those that:

• Treat data as a strategic asset

• Show up wherever their customers (and their agents) are

• Build flexible, composable commerce architectures

• Move quickly, test often, and adapt continuously

The final word:

In short: the agentic era isn’t coming – it’s already here. And the time to prepare is now.