Retailers risk invisibility as AI shopping agents pick winners
But alongside that convenience came something less visible – effort.
Today’s digital commerce environment is built around a familiar set of actions: search, comparison, reviews, recommendations and checkout.
For years, the assumption was that more choice would naturally create better customer outcomes. In reality, the opposite has often happened. Consumers now navigate an exhausting volume of information across platforms, marketplaces and channels, with every additional step increasing the likelihood of hesitation or abandonment.
The Accenture research shows that as many as 85% of consumers are likely to abandon purchases because of frustration, indecision or an overly complex buying journey.
What businesses frequently interpret as engagement is, in many cases, friction disguised as activity.
That friction now sits at the centre of the next major shift in commerce.
Agentic commerce represents an evolution where AI agents no longer simply assist consumers during the buying journey, but actively participate in decisions on their behalf. These systems can interpret intent, compare products, evaluate trade-offs, assess pricing, filter recommendations and complete transactions with minimal customer intervention.
What was previously a multi-step purchasing journey increasingly becomes a single, outcome-driven interaction.
This changes the commercial landscape fundamentally because brands are no longer selling only to people. Increasingly, they are also selling to the systems acting on behalf of those people.
That distinction matters, particularly in South Africa, where digital commerce continues to accelerate across retail, consumer goods, telecommunications, financial services and automotive sectors. Yet local consumers remain highly value-conscious and deliberate in their purchasing decisions.
Price sensitivity, trust and clarity still influence behaviour strongly, especially in an economy where consumers are managing rising costs and tighter disposable income. In that environment, reducing friction is no longer simply a customer experience objective – it becomes a direct growth lever.
The implications extend far beyond websites and digital storefronts. Traditionally, brands competed for human attention through advertising, positioning and customer experience.
Increasingly, however, businesses will compete for algorithmic consideration. If product information, pricing structures, fulfilment policies and inventory systems are inconsistent, unclear or difficult for intelligent systems to interpret, brands risk disappearing from consideration entirely. The customer may never actively reject a business.
Instead, the AI system acting on the customer’s behalf may simply never surface it as a viable option.
That is the real inflection point emerging within commerce today. Agentic commerce is not merely a front-end marketing evolution. It reaches deep into enterprise operations. Pricing transparency, inventory accuracy, fulfilment reliability, returns simplicity and payment infrastructure all become factors that influence whether intelligent systems select a product or service.
The shift therefore places operational efficiency and data integrity at the centre of competitiveness.
For many South African organisations, this creates both pressure and opportunity. Legacy infrastructure, fragmented data environments and siloed operating models already constrain digital growth across many industries.
In an agent-driven commerce environment, those weaknesses become significantly more visible and commercially costly. At the same time, the upside is substantial. Agentic commerce has the potential to improve the economics of selling by reducing abandoned carts, lowering cost-to-serve, improving fulfilment accuracy and strengthening customer retention.
When purchasing journeys become clearer and transactions become simpler, businesses spend less effort acquiring demand and more effectively converting and fulfilling it. In a market where margin discipline remains critical, those efficiencies carry significant commercial value.
For most organisations, the immediate priority will not be building proprietary AI agents. The more urgent challenge is becoming easy for those systems to find, understand, evaluate and transact with.
That requires structured product data, transparent pricing, reliable fulfilment systems and governance models capable of supporting increasingly automated purchasing environments.
A smaller group of organisations, particularly those with strong category authority and rich first-party data ecosystems, may eventually position themselves differently – becoming the agents of choice within their own platforms and ecosystems, shaping purchasing decisions more directly.
The question for business leaders is no longer whether this shift is coming. It is already underway.
The more important question is whether organisations are structured to remain visible, trusted and competitive in a market where purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by both people and intelligent systems.
In this next phase of commerce, success will also depend on reducing complexity, building confidence and creating seamless buying experiences that both consumers and AI-driven systems can navigate efficiently.
Businesses that simplify decision-making, strengthen operational reliability and remove friction across the purchasing journey will be better positioned to capture demand and sustain long-term growth.