Agentic commerce: The paradox of tech advances

Zawya

19-05-2025

With the evolution of technology, business, society, and humans have increased their capacity to absorb change and developments. The new buzzword in the marketplace is agentic commerce, which was approximately $5-$6.7 billion in 2024. This includes the worldwide adoption of agentic AI solutions across various sectors like retail payments and customer service. It is expected to reach $10.41 billion by the end of 2025. It is forecasted that by 2030 to 2040, it will touch $41 to 200 billion. The annual growth rates are expected to be 35% to over 55%.
The estimates are indicative of an explosive growth trajectory. Rapid digitalisation and automation across industries are leading to increasing reliance on AI. Furthermore, the advancements in AI models, integration with payment systems, and the demand for hyper-personalisation and seamless, autonomous shopping experiences, coupled with cost reduction and operational efficiency across enterprises, fuel the exponential growth of agentic commerce.
For those wondering what this is all about, agentic refers to the ability to act independently and exhibit or achieve outcomes with external directions. Agentic is a rapidly emerging terminology in the field of AI. Agentic are AI systems that can autonomously pursue complex goals, make decisions, adapt, and execute multiple complex steps with minimal human interference. These systems are functioning beyond traditional automation. They are highly adaptive systems that can learn from experience and self-optimise based on real-time feedback. Agentic AI can potentially use advanced reasoning to solve people's problems. Agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to solve complex, multi-step problems.
The new transformative model in digital retail is called agentic-based commerce. Within the e-commerce system, AI agents act independently, execute, and complete transactions for users and businesses. AI agents power agentic commerce and are built from large models and other advanced AI technologies. Agentic systems, in terms of technological advancement in artificial intelligence, mark a significant step towards the creation of truly autonomous, adaptable, and proactive machines that can handle complex, dynamic tasks with minimal human oversight.
The pace of technological advancement in artificial intelligence is applaudable. Humans have harnessed technology's potential to enhance efficiency and convenience and alleviate human suffering to some extent. However, artificial intelligence risks are eclipsing and/or eroding human-centric life experiences and amplifying systematic vulnerabilities.
Innovations like AI-driven personalisation, virtual fitting rooms, smart shopping, AR, and VR tools that allow customers to visualise products remotely have arrived to revolutionise shopping experiences.
Yet, these developments cannot replicate or replace the social bonding or spontaneity of in-store experiences. The paradigm shift witnessed towards hyper-convenience comes with a risk of commodifying human interactions and experiencing and prioritising speed over human connections. Human dependency on technological revolutions also exposes critical systemic weaknesses. For instance, the recent outages, such as Europe's April 2025 blackout, which affected 60 million people, and Microsoft's March 2024 service collapse, demonstrate systemic fragility.
These events, which occurred in scant numbers, disrupted financial transactions, healthcare, and transportation and cost billions in lost productivity. Such technological developments can also increase AI-driven fraud and cloud infrastructure breaches that could threaten global stability. Psychologically speaking, excessive technology dependence correlates with increased levels of anxiety, social isolation, and attention deficits, which are more prevalent among adolescents.
Research affirms that excessive screen time correlates with reduced empathy and emotional resilience, as online AI algorithms prioritise customer engagement over well-being. Artificial intelligence has had transformative effects and has demonstrated its potential to uplift society, yet it needs to be dealt with sufficient safeguards.
Humankind's grave challenge lies in its ability to balance technological developments with safeguards and ensure that technology integration in daily activities does not lead to psychological disruptions or an increase in malicious intentions.
As a society, we need to embrace and prioritise sustainability, resilience, and the well-being of people beyond efficiency. I leave my readers with a question they must ponder seriously: "As we all navigate this paradigm shift in duality, will technology fortify and enhance our future or render us perpetually vulnerable to systems we have created?'
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