Artificial intelligence agents buying goods from other agents. The end of keyword search. Crypto replacing credit cards. These are not distant scenarios according to senior executives gathered at Rezolve Ai’s booth at ShopTalk Europe today, they are the near-term trajectory of retail and e-commerce.
Five sessions hosted by the agentic commerce company brought together leaders from Microsoft, Sonae Group, Fashionable, Accenture, and PwC to examine what AI-driven commerce means for brands that want to remain competitive. The conversations were bold and visionary.
“In a few years time, everybody is going to be using agents all the time, everybody is going to be paying with crypto, and nobody is going to be clicking and tapping,” said David Ingram, Chief Product Officer at Rezolve Ai. “Two years from now this will be the norm. Three years from now we will look back at the first 30 years of e-commerce and think: it was so simplistic.”
The numbers behind that trajectory are striking. Juniper Research estimates total agentic commerce transaction value at $8 billion in 2026, with projections reaching $3.5 trillion by 2031 — a cumulative growth rate of over 43,000%. McKinsey’s projections are similarly ambitious. The firm projects that agentic commerce alone could facilitate $3 to $5 trillion in consumer sales globally by 2030, under a moderate growth scenario.
Joao Silveira, Global Black Belt Business Applications EMEA at Microsoft, framed the shift in terms that go beyond current business models entirely. “The time will come where agents will be buying for us from other agents. That opens completely new business models. Who the new winners of this commerce age will be, we still don’t know. They might be walking around here today.”
The Collapse of Search as a Commerce Channel
A recurring theme across sessions was the structural decline of traditional keyword search and its replacement by AI-driven product discovery — a shift that carries significant consequences for how brands maintain visibility.
Radoslaw Pijik, Retail Industry Director EMEA at Microsoft, explained how the real situation now unfolds for merchants and e-commerce platforms: “You might have amazing touch points, but you will be invisible to customers if you don’t take care of AEO. We’re heading toward a zero-click economy.”
AEO, short for Answer Engine Optimisation, refers to the practice of making brand content readable and rankable by AI agents rather than traditional search engines. Traffic to retail sites from generative AI platforms has already increased 4,700% year-over-year, with ChatGPT driving roughly twice as many new customers as traditional search channels. The implication for retailers is that today being discoverable to an AI agent is already as critical or even more so as any other element of digital presence.
The behavioral data supports that shift. According to Rezolve Ai’s ShopTalk Europe Insight Report released this week, filter usage among online shoppers has dropped 13%, and sessions extending beyond page one of results have fallen by the same margin. Meanwhile, the share of purchases completed within a single search session rose from 60% to 70%, and long-tail queries — the specific, conversational prompts associated with intent-driven behavior — grew from 25% to 40% of total search activity. Together, the figures describe a consumer who is arriving at the point of purchase with a precise intent already formed, bypassing the exploratory browsing patterns that defined the first era of e-commerce.
Data Gap Behind the Hype
Despite the scale of projected growth, industry leaders were candid about the gap between AI adoption and measurable financial returns.
Andrés Diego, Partner for AI Analytics and Platforms at PwC, cited data that reflects a tension now familiar to many enterprise leaders: “Generative AI retail traffic is growing at 1,200%. Yet 56% of CEOs see no significant AI financial benefit yet. We need to make sure that usage and demand is generating the impact that companies are expecting.”
Consumer data tells a similarly mixed story: 43% of consumers report positive experiences with AI-assisted shopping, yet 55% worry about identity theft and 51% feel they could lose control over their finances. Only 16% of US consumers currently trust AI to make payments on their behalf.
That trust gap, rather than technology readiness, is emerging as the primary constraint on the market’s near-term growth.
Payments, Margins, and the Web3 Case
Ingram also made a pointed argument for the financial logic of AI-native payment infrastructure. “Credit cards were invented 70 years ago. The e-commerce experience hasn’t fundamentally changed in 30 years. A zero-fee Web3 payment isn’t just a saving. That 3% of revenue could be 20 or 30% of your margin. It’s really significant.”
The payments infrastructure underlying agentic commerce is already evolving rapidly. In 2026, several competing protocol standards are vying for dominance, including the Agentic Commerce Protocol developed jointly by OpenAI and Stripe, Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol co-developed with Shopify, Walmart, Target and others, and blockchain-based alternatives such as Coinbase-supported x402 and Ethereum’s ERC-8004.
Identity in the Age of the Avatar
Orlando Ribas, CEO of Fashionable, offered one of the more vivid images of where consumer-facing commerce is heading: “We’re moving toward a world where you will see yourself as the main model. Your own avatar wearing the glasses, the jacket, the footwear, while the brand keeps selling the dream with its DNA intact.”
The personalisation Ribas describes depends on identity infrastructure that is still being built. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative and Mastercard’s Agent Suite, both launched within recent months, focus specifically on Know Your Agent (KYA) frameworks — cryptographic verification systems designed to distinguish legitimate AI shopping agents from malicious bots. Solving that problem is a prerequisite for the kind of trusted, personalised agentic experience Ribas envisions.
Sessions continue at Rezolve Ai’s booth (G50) on June 10, covering GUESS’s preparations for agentic commerce, new rules of AI-era product discovery, and B2B applications, with participants including representatives from GUESS, Groupe Dynamite, and RS Components.
