Why The Future of Agentic Commerce Is Far More Bullish Than Your Timeline Makes It Feel

In the last few weeks, we have seen a flurry of posts pronouncing agentic commerce dead on arrival: 

“Despite growing concerns over AI disintermediation, Uber executives revealed that third-party bots accounted for just four rides and 500 food deliveries out of 320 million transactions” - The Verge

“I have NEVER in my life heard so much hype and discussion about a tech/product experience that basically does not work at all for me. I feel like I’m using theranos” - @maiab

“I remain skeptical on consumer adoption of agentic commerce. People love shopping. That's the last thing they will outsource.” - @raphbaph 

At Self Labs, we have a different view. We believe agentic commerce is not only here to stay, but it is going to completely change the way people and organizations make purchases online. This will happen as the relationship between humans and their agents shifts from delegating tasks to an actually autonomous assistant that knows you and your taste. As agents learn your style, your budgets, and which stores you prefer, with access and genuinely useful infrastructure, you can trust them to get it right. 

Early Agent Vault usage data backs this up: users rarely turn down the suggestion of their agents, letting them buy the proposed products 94.8% of the time. The demand is already there too, Meta reported more than a quarter of Muse’s 10 million users have made purchases, making shopping its #1 activity. 

Most people don’t love the act of shopping, they love the act of discovering and finding. No one enjoys punching their credit card details and shipping address in an online form, chasing packages across 5 different sites or begging to cancel a gym membership. That is the work the agents will take. 

Agentic commerce today feels broken because everyone wants something different from the experience. Shoppers look for the feeling of finding what they want, or just the result of getting what they want, while merchants want to maintain their customer relationship and platforms want to own the agent and its data. Most products today are built for one of those three groups, so the other two limit the agent’s functionality or block it altogether.

That conflict of interest between platform and person is clear when you look at how your data is used today. Big platforms store tons of data on your preferences, but use it to keep you on their app longer and sell you their advertisers’ products. With Agent Vault, your agent isn’t stuck in one app, and it can sign in to as many of your accounts as you allow, so its understanding of you isn’t limited to your Instagram activity. As interpreting that data gets cheaper and more of it runs on your own device, your agent can learn your sizes and preferences over time, while Agent Vault keeps that data private.

As a team that cares deeply about protecting people’s privacy, we have been doing our part, building various solutions to help protect people in this new era of the internet, whether it is by providing a range of identity infrastructure or portable credential vaults that work across everyone’s favorite assistants and sites and apps we already love today. That work has taught us one thing above all: the missing piece is the right user experience. It has to be rebuilt from first principles. 

Here we outline a set of interactions and premises we believe will shape the future of agentic commerce

See it. Get it! 

A photo becomes a shopping cart. Today, people ask their agents (or use the Google app) to reverse image search things they see and want in daily life. There’s no AI-native way to complete the process: agents seeing, searching, and buying, all just by just uploading a photo. Your agent could even go further, suggesting pieces that fit your style better and learning your taste from the things that catch your eye.

Any link turned into an order. Simply sharing a link and let your agent take care of the rest.

Voice should be enough. Just say what you want and consider it bought.

Siri becomes the storefront. We think native assistants like Siri, coupled with tools like Agent Vault, can be a major unlock in simplifying the user experience, leveraging the iPhone’s Dynamic Island. This is especially useful when you don’t care about the brand or comparing options, you just want the item ordered fast. With iOS 27.3 opening Siri’s third-party actions for developers, this is closer to possible than ever. Here’s an example:

Hand off the parts that take time.

Agents win where humans run out of patience.

Buying for someone else is as easy as buying for yourself. Bookmark gift ideas as you see or think of them, with the recipient’s taste and preferences saved for future suggestions. When it’s time, you can ship with the price hidden and a personalized note. 

Agents can coordinate with other agents. If you’re hosting a dinner party, your agent can check in with your guests’ agents on any allergies and their owners’ favorite foods. From there, it can buy everything you need for the night, even buying wine with Self Agent ID verifying that you’re over 21.

Have the agent track price movements. It’s near impossible for a human to keep tabs on price movements, especially with dynamic pricing or inflated costs before a big sale. Imagine setting your agent to track a price and buy the item right when it hits its lowest cost. Think of it as a limit order on anything you want to buy, or going further, you could name your price and let sellers compete for it.

Secondhand hunt, automated. Online secondhand marketplaces are taking over. The #1 shopping app in both iOS and Google Play stores is Vinted, eBay just reported 14% Q3 growth, and marketplaces like Mercari are seeing increased profits.

But you need to hunt for what you’re looking for, review the different conditions of every piece, evaluate the quality and decide what you’re willing to pay, and often negotiate price with the seller.  Agent Vault will put this work in one place, payments and logins included.

You stay in control.

Delegation only works when control is effortless. This is where agentic commerce earns trust or loses it, so let’s dive in.

Lockscreen controls. As agentic shopping interactions become more native on mobile, approving purchases directly from the lock screen can further simplify the experience for users. Approving in just a few seconds and moving on with your day delivers the convenience most people associate with agentic commerce and are still waiting for.

Order tracking. As your various agents place orders across multiple sites and apps, there should be an easy way for you to see all your orders in one place and track shipping, etc.

Managing subscriptions and memberships. Canceling subscriptions and memberships has been one of the early killer use cases of assistants.

Kill switch. Of course, sometimes you just want to hit the pause button, pull the plug on all your agents. Let’s make that as easy as possible too.

Build It With Us.

Agentic commerce hasn’t failed. It just has not been fully built yet. While these examples show interactions through a native Agent Vault mobile app, which is currently in early testing, we also imagine these experiences coming to life across a range of partner applications, powered by Agent Vault.

If you run an online store, build an assistant or move payments, and you want this future sooner, reach out.