Agentic Commerce

    Agentic Commerce: Building the Next Channel Before Competitors Do

    Commerce is moving from browser and app into conversation. Product discovery, comparison, and increasingly checkout are shifting to dialogue with an AI agent, opening up new possibilities for how we discover, choose, and buy.

    Your storefront agent

    Discovery to checkout, in dialogue

    Something for a rainy hike under €150
    Three options in stock — shall I add the lightest one?
    Yes, and check next-day delivery
    Cart ready. Confirm to pay €139.

    +35%

    Larger carts

    +60%

    Completion

    +40%

    SMB conversion

    Why this matters now

    Carts up to 35% larger and purchase completion up to 60% higher in early Claude-powered shopping deployments.

    Roughly 40% higher conversion for small businesses selling through agentic sales agents.

    A clear majority of consumers now say they're open to an AI agent shopping on their behalf.

    Two paths to agentic commerce

    Two paths to agentic commerce

    Path one

    Be found by agents you don't control

    Your products show up where shoppers are already asking agents what to buy. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot can discover, compare, and recommend your products as part of the conversation.

    You get reach, but the agent owns the moment. It shapes the shortlist, the recommendation, and increasingly the journey to purchase. Your brand becomes part of an experience you don't control.

    Path two

    Build agents into your own storefront

    Instead of handing the conversation to a third party, bring an agent into the experience you already own. It can help customers discover products, make decisions, and move through checkout while staying within your brand and your commerce environment.

    Anthropic is already showing what this can look like, with practical agent patterns and industry starting points that businesses can build on today. The opportunity is to take that foundation further: connect the agent to your own systems, define what it can do, and build the controls needed to make it work reliably for real customers and real transactions.

    The relationship stays closer to you. So does the data, the experience, and the ability to shape how your customers interact with your business.

    The Protocol Landscape

    How AI agents transact with merchants is being defined right now

    And not by one standard, but by several competing at once.

    ProtocolBackersWhat it covers
    Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)Google, now stewarded by the FIDO AllianceSigned consent chain from intent to payment
    Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)OpenAI, StripeThe checkout handshake itself
    Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)Shopify, GoogleFull journey from discovery to fulfillment
    Visa Trusted Agent ProtocolVisaNetwork tokenization and agent trust, converging toward mandate-based models
    Mastercard Agent PayMastercardAgent-initiated payments through network tokenization
    x402CoinbaseMachine-to-machine micropayments, an emerging fourth track

    None of these approaches has won yet, and betting on the wrong one is expensive to unwind. Anthropic is taking a different position: giving businesses the building blocks to bring commerce agents into their own storefronts, rather than handing the customer relationship to a third-party platform.

    The question isn't which protocol to commit to. It's how to build an architecture that can move as standards evolve and consolidate. AP2, ACP, and UCP are still developing, so the businesses best positioned will be those that can adapt without rebuilding their commerce stack every time the standards shift.

    That's where we come in: building an architecture that can move with the market, rather than betting on where it lands.

    Our approach

    01

    Landscape assessment

    Where AP2, ACP, UCP, and network tokenization intersect with your existing payment and commerce stack.

    02

    Architecture design

    An agent layer built to work with today’s standards and adapt as the landscape evolves.

    03

    Pilot and rollout

    A working commerce agent, governed and reviewed before it touches production traffic.

    Two Agents, Two Roles

    Where the value actually sits

    The consumer agent

    The conversational layer between a shopper's intent and your cart. It searches your catalog in natural language, assembles multi-item intents, handles cart actions and checkout, resolves post-purchase questions, and remembers preference across visits.

    The return is immediate: larger baskets, higher completion, and a relationship that stays inside your app instead of migrating to a third-party assistant. But putting an agent this close to the transaction means getting the boundaries right. What it can access, change, and approve needs to be defined before it starts acting on behalf of customers.

    The merchant agent

    The operating layer behind the storefront, built for the teams running it. Merchandising teams can ask what's selling, check pricing and inventory, and prepare promotions without jumping between BI tools, spreadsheets, and merchandising systems. Marketing teams can build segments and campaigns without stitching together data from CRM and marketing platforms. Operations teams can investigate storefront issues without turning routine questions into tickets for data or engineering.

    The agent doesn't replace those systems. It replaces much of the manual work required to use them: finding the right data, pulling reports, answering routine questions, and preparing changes. Those changes are staged for review before they reach the storefront, with automation available for tasks you deliberately choose to run under a defined policy.

    Where It Becomes Real

    Six places agentic commerce becomes real

    Use case 1 of 6

    Guided product discovery

    "Our shoppers know what they want, but they still can't find it in our catalogue. Do we need a bigger search engine, or a smarter one?"

    Keyword search fails exactly where natural language succeeds: a shopper describing a need ("something for a rainy hike under €150") rather than typing a SKU or category name.

    We connect Claude to your existing search and ranking infrastructure through a dedicated discovery skill, so the model reasons about intent while your proven ranking logic still decides what's actually relevant. Results are returned through a structured presentation tool rather than plain text, so they render as proper product cards. We also assess how far your underlying product data needs to improve before this pays off, since discovery quality is as much a data problem as a model one.

    The aim is simple: Show the right products for what a customer means, not just what they typed.

    The result: A discovery experience that understands intent, keeps your existing ranking logic in control, and turns "I can't find it" into a completed search.

    Use case 2 of 6

    Agentic checkout

    "If an agent can complete a purchase, how do we know the payment is authorized, and what happens when something goes wrong?"

    An agent can find the right products and build the cart, but checkout is different. It involves real money, customer consent, payment credentials, refunds, and fraud controls. Your existing payment stack needs to know what the agent is allowed to do and when a transaction still needs customer approval.

    We connect the agent to your existing cart and payment systems without giving it direct access to move money. We define what it can add to a cart, what it can change, and when it needs to stop and ask for approval. We then map the available payment standards and tokenization options to your existing PSP, acquirer, and payment setup, so you can support agentic checkout without replacing the infrastructure that already works.

    The aim is simple: Let customers complete a purchase through the conversation while keeping payment authorization and risk controls in the systems that already govern your checkout.

    The result: A checkout that can support agent-led purchases without giving the agent more access than the business intends.

    Use case 3 of 6

    Complex trip and bundle planning

    "A holiday booking touches five different systems. How is an agent supposed to hold all of that together, and who gets paid when it does?"

    Composing a multi-supplier purchase (flights, hotels, cars) is a harder reasoning problem than a single product cart, and settling across suppliers and currencies isn't a solved problem either.

    We build the planning skill so Claude calls multiple supplier systems in parallel within one conversation, and wire in memory so preferences, such as a preferred airline or loyalty tier, carry across the session automatically. On the payment side, we determine whether your case needs supplier-scoped payment mandates or a merchant-of-record layer that settles one checkout across multiple providers behind the scenes.

    The aim is simple: Give customers one coherent recommendation instead of five separate bookings, without pushing settlement complexity onto them.

    The result: A single, confident booking experience where the reasoning happens in the open and the payment complexity is fully absorbed behind it.

    Use case 4 of 6

    Post-purchase service

    "Customers want refunds resolved instantly, but we can't have an agent just deciding to give money back."

    Post-purchase requests are where customer expectations meet financial risk. Refunds are straightforward when a person handles them, but an agent needs clear rules about what it can approve and when a person needs to step in.

    We set up a simple review process so refunds can be prepared by the agent but only issued when the right conditions are met. Every request is checked again before the money moves, so limits and customer details are still valid at that point. We also make sure the refund goes back through the same payment path as the original purchase, including when an agent was involved in the payment.

    The aim is simple: Resolve customer issues fast without ever letting the agent hold financial authority it shouldn't have.

    The result: Faster resolution for customers, and a refund process your finance team can still fully account for.

    Use case 5 of 6

    Catalog and pricing operations

    "Our catalogue is huge and prices drift constantly. Can an agent actually keep it clean, or does that just create new mistakes at scale?"

    Catalog and pricing accuracy degrade quietly across a large product range, and errors here are exactly what eventually surfaces as a wrong price at checkout.

    We connect Claude, with read and write access, to your product, inventory, and pricing systems so it can catch drift and stale listings, and set every correction up as a staged change: nothing reaches your live storefront without a person's approval, unless you deliberately choose to automate part of it under a defined policy.

    The aim is simple: Keep the catalogue accurate at a scale a manual team can't sustain, without giving up control over what actually goes live.

    The result: A catalogue that stays current on its own, and the foundation your checkout agent's "never invent a price" guarantee actually depends on.

    Use case 6 of 6

    Sales analytics, promotions, and campaigns

    "We want an agent drafting promotions, but what stops it from approving a discount our finance team never signed off on?"

    Promotional and campaign work moves fast, but a discount that isn't validated against the same rules checkout enforces can quietly cost more than it earns.

    We connect Claude to your sales and performance data so it can draft promotions and campaigns, choose the right model tier for analysis-heavy work versus latency-sensitive conversation, and validate every draft against the same pricing and cart rules your checkout agent enforces live, before anything reaches a customer.

    The aim is simple: Move as fast as the market while keeping every discount inside the boundaries the business actually approved.

    The result: Promotions and campaigns that ship faster, without ever drifting outside what your finance and pricing teams intended.

    Where We Bring Experience

    The decisions the technology can't make for you

    Anthropic provides the models and building blocks for commerce agents. But it can't decide how an agent should work within your business: what systems it can access, what actions it can take, when a customer needs to approve something, or where the business needs a human to step in.

    Those decisions depend on your existing systems, your customers, and how much risk you're willing to take. We help define those boundaries and turn them into an architecture that works in practice.

    01

    Architecture

    Design how agents fit into your storefront, commerce stack, and existing systems.

    02

    Safety & controls

    Set clear boundaries for what agents can see, change, and approve, and where people stay in the loop.

    03

    Data & memory

    Decide what agents should know and remember, how that data is managed, and what should never persist.

    04

    Testing & evaluation

    Test agents against real customer and business scenarios, with the teams who know those cases best.

    05

    Commerce & payments

    Connect agents to your catalog, cart, inventory, and payment stack, and work through the standards your setup can support.

    06

    Operations

    Put the right ownership, monitoring, release process, and controls in place to run agents safely in production.

    Anthropic provides the building blocks. We help you work out how they fit your systems, your payments, and your way of operating, then put it into production.

    Get Started

    Build the channel while the window is still open.

    Whether you're evaluating the protocol landscape or ready to pilot a commerce agent on your own storefront, we help you make the architecture and payment decisions that hold up in production.

    New to the topic? Start with our primer: Agentic Commerce: AI Agents in E-Commerce