By David Sénécal
Lately, we have been hearing a lot about AI bots, agentic AI, and the emerging field of agentic commerce. AI platforms offer a new way for users to interact with the internet, promising to make consumers’ lives easier by helping them find information faster and streamline their shopping experience.
But traffic from well-known AI platforms only represents the tip of the iceberg. A whole new ecosystem of applications, running AI agents or a new generation of web browsers like Comet that incorporate AI assistants, is emerging to enable agentic commerce. With it come several protocols to facilitate new types of interactions with websites.
What is an AI agent?
According to Anthropic, “Agent can be defined […] as fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods, using various tools to accomplish complex tasks.” Agents may be autonomous when it comes to figuring out how to execute and solve a task, but let’s be clear: The task is always initiated by human interaction with the AI platform.
In contrast, the same complex interaction can be performed manually through a browser, albeit more slowly, and would require the human brain to summarize and arrive at the necessary answer. It’s essential to understand this context to demystify the role of AI agents and AI platforms.
AI bots disrupt the established mode of interaction
AI agents often use headless browser technology to render and ingest the content they collect or execute actions on the targeted site on behalf of users. They are not designed with malicious intent. However, this doesn’t mean that a user cannot trick them into performing malicious activity.
AI platforms also scrape the internet to train their models, which enables their agents to perform. Part of the answer may be available in the data used to train the model, but the AI agent may also need to visit the websites it trained on in real time to get the latest information.
The trained model will help the agent determine which site to consult to get all the necessary data to formulate an answer, then produce a summary.
AI agents disrupt established modes of interaction with websites and internet revenue models. Figuring out how to deal with AI bots is becoming an existential problem for publishers. For merchants, AI bots don’t pose an imminent threat but rather represent an opportunity. The internet is still figuring out how to adapt to this mode of interaction.
Impact on ecommerce
Despite initial wariness in the market about AI agents and the knee-jerk reaction to block this new type of bot that collects massive amounts of data, ecommerce website owners have quickly reversed course and are now looking to optimize their infrastructure to cater to AI agents.
The retail industry
For retailers, introducing an AI application to offer a personal shopper assistant experience probably makes sense, provided the customer knows exactly what they’re looking for. Buying groceries seems like a straightforward proposition for agentic commerce, but shopping for other items may be a different story. Shoppers like me generally only have a vague idea of what we want until we see a specific item.
In some cases, describing what we want to the AI system may be challenging. However, one can imagine an AI agent that serves as a personal shopper, asking the user about their tastes, offering different product options for the user to select, and, through trial and error, learning the user’s preferences over time.
On the surface, agentic commerce doesn’t seem to be a problem for ecommerce and may help attract more customers to a brand. However, in a pure agentic interaction, merchants may miss out on upsell opportunities. If someone is interested in buying a specific item, AI bots can select products or services that match the criteria and immediately handle the checkout process.
Although this system is efficient, end users will not see the recommended products and services that the website’s marketing team went to great lengths to position, so it potentially limits the dollar amount a user will spend.
Impact on the publishers and public forums
The adoption of AI agents is already strong for web search. I often use them when researching various topics. Unfortunately, this new behavior poses a problem for publishers or online forums that only offer information and depend on online ad revenue and affiliate marketing to generate revenue. Today’s users don’t always visit the sites where the original data was collected to generate the answer.
If someone wants the latest news or tomorrow’s local weather forecast, they may instead ask ChatGPT or similar platforms for the highlights. This drop in page views reduces revenue for sites that depend on online advertising and/or subscriptions. Online ads and, to some extent, the collection of user data have allowed a significant part of the internet to remain free and keep publishers in business. The new mode of interaction through AI agents poses a threat to this business model.
Agentic AI is transforming how users and automation interact with the web — changing how people shop, search, and consume content. As AI-driven traffic continues to rise, it’s disrupting traditional publishing business models and reshaping online commerce.
(The author is Director of Engineering at Akamai, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
