TL;DR:
Agentic commerce shifts from fighting bots to enabling smart agents.
AI agents simplify transactions, replacing human-driven systems.
Commerce must adapt for agent-led interactions using blockchain.
Agents eliminate scalper bots, enabling seamless, rule-based sales.
Ecommerce evolves with agents driving frictionless experiences.
Online commerce was built with around two fundamental and contrasting ideas: optimize for humans, protect against bots. This architecture of our digital economy has grown as a reaction to the relentless competition between bots and traditional human users. From ticket scalping to spammy checkout scripts, much energy has been spent on keeping these automated programs out.
The next decade of online commerce will be a 180 from this pattern. It will be about optimizing for bots – or agents.
This is the era of agentic commerce.
Before we get into the weeds, let's be clear about the difference between bots and agents, because they are not the same. A bot follows predefined instructions to complete tasks, while an AI agent is autonomous, learns from its environment, and makes decisions to achieve its goals.
Or, in simple terms: bots – stupid, agents – smart.
Beyond that; their purposes differ significantly. In this context, bots are typically designed to game the system—buying up concert tickets to resell for profit, scraping information, or exploiting limited releases. Their aim is adversarial, optimized to circumvent barriers for individual gain, often at the cost of genuine consumers.
By contrast, agents are built to represent human intent faithfully. These autonomous agents act as digital proxies, performing tasks on our behalf, transacting with the speed of software but aligned with our interests.
The key is turning commerce from a bot-vs-human dynamic to a human-agent partnership (while probably still battling the stupid bots).
Online commerce (e-commerce) is a $18 trillion market that follows an optimization arc tighly mapped to the way humans interact with brands and products online. First, evolving from computers to mobile phones. Later adapting to social networks and social networking enabled commerce as attention drifted there. And, lately, the first adaptions of immersive commerce (in Roblox), as attention drift has continued in that direction.
The next significant UI/UX paradigm shift could be agentic abstraction of commerce.
In short, agentic commerce means that the storefront is abstracted away. The agent handles interactions with the human who’s instructions it follow. The agent becomes the core user of the storefront, and acts as a middle-layer between customers and the stores they buy from.
And, it's not just an interface challenge.
The entire system of online transactions—credit cards, online banking, checkouts—is a digital extension of physical systems created for and by humans. These systems are inherently human-centric and, because of that, have an implicit assumption: every transaction involves a person navigating the process.
With agents, this assumption no longer holds. Future commerce must be re-engineered to optimize for agents transacting seamlessly, on behalf of humans. Concepts like Virtuals, and other platforms focusing on autonomous agents, are examples of this evolution. In these agentic systems, a personal AI can become a trusted economic actor, able to verify itself, transact, and navigate digital spaces—not for exploitation but for genuine facilitation.
Blockchains, tokens and programmable money is built to solve this challenge.
We're already seeing this happen in crypto-land. Getting setup onchain to start investing in the next, hot memecoin (yes, yes) is notoriously cumbersome. Although the space has seen significant improvements (better wallet products, faster swaps etc.) it's still… not simple.
Agentic products will abstract away this complexity. The big UI/UX unlock to bring people onchain was never to make the buttons better, it's to remove them:
Like many other things in crypto, it's not just a crypto thing. Many of the things happening in cryptoland are early signs of what's to come for the internet at large (although most people are still ignorant to this pattern).
Agentic commerce isn't limited to swapping memecoins. It's the next point of the arc of ecommerce optimization.
Consider all the tasks you may do in order to complete a purchase; research to find the right product, searching for the best price, considering past reviews, completing the purchase. And many small steps in between.
In an agentic commerce environment all fo these tasks can be compressed and delegated into a frictionless experience.
To facilitate this, we should see a gradual rise in headless commerce solutions built on crypto rails. The concept of a online storefront is already fragmenting into many smaller pieces; agentic commerce is another such piece.
Here's an example of how agentic abstraction of commerce can change the overall consumer experience:
Consider the current scenario for ticketing to high-demand events – like a Taylor Swift concert. Today, a clusterfuck of a battlefield with genuine fans battling with swarms of ticketing scalper bots looking to suck up tickets to resell at inflated prices on secondary markets. It's a shitty experience.
Now, imagine an agentic abstraction of this ticket sale happening onchain:
Fan asks agent to buy tickets
Agent has it's own wallet, fan supplies the neccesary funds
Promoter sets up a matrix of rules programmatically describing priorities for the onsale
Agent has delegated access to the fan's proof-of-fandom credentials (eg. verifiable social metrics, streaming plays, fanclub membership etc. etc.)
Agent submits request for ticket allocation embedded with above credentials
Promoter (agent) sifts through these requests and allocates tickets based on the rule matrix
Once approved, your agent finalizes the transaction, paying onchain, collecting the ticket onchain, and notifying you—its human—that your ticket has been secured.
el, Taylor Swift could theoretically sell out an entire world tour in a matter of seconds—just a few blocks on the blockchain—without the headache of crashing websites and endless queues.
This is, obviously a theoretical case that in practice would require many (broken) parts of the current model to be swapped, fixed and remodeled. Still, it illustrates the potential of going further.
Some of the component parts to this is already being built, like Camp Network looking to bridge web2 activity with web3 credentials (wrote more about them a few months ago). The previous essays on "onchain backbacking" and "onchain fandom" also explore some of the component concepts in depth.
This kind of agentic commerce could fundamentally reframe how we think about buying, not only for tickets but for all kinds of goods and services. The introduction of autonomous agents into commerce abstracts away the current struggles we face—queues, middlemen, excessive security measures—and instead replaces them with a seamless system that works directly to fulfill our needs.
But, it requires both a rewiring of the current ecommerce infrastructure, and further proliferation of the "ai agent as the next interface" thesis. This won't happen all at once, like next year. But, I'm convinced it's going to happen, and that if you want to shape this space, now is the time to start working on your idea.
If you're building (or considering) in the agentic commerce space, please reach out. I would love to jam with you.
As always, reach out to me on X or Farcaster if you have feedback or are working on something cool you want to discuss.
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