Agentic Commerce reveals the rot beneath digital commerce

The change is here

There is a growing sense that something fundamental is about to change in digital commerce.

Not another platform shift.
Not a new interface.
Not another wave of campaigns or personalization.

What is changing is how decisions are made.

As more buying journeys begin inside agents, assistants and automated systems, commerce is slowly moving away from human interpretation and toward machine evaluation. And that shift has a very specific requirement: correct and reliable data truth.

This is where many organizations will struggle. Not because they lack ambition or technology, but because digital commerce was never built for this kind of scrutiny.

What digital commerce was built on

For a long time, digital commerce has been built on appearance rather than correct and reliable data truth.
Beautiful interfaces. Perfect product images. Carefully staged storytelling. A sense that if it looks right, it must be right.

It has worked. For a while.

Digitalization allowed companies to move forward without fixing what was underneath. Data inconsistencies could be corrected manually. Missing attributes could be worked around. Inventory mismatches could be explained away. Integrations could be fragile, as long as someone was there to monitor them.

That safety net shaped how systems were designed. Humans filled the gaps.

Agentic Commerce will change that completely!

When intelligence reaches the information layer

Agentic Commerce will not arrive as a fresh start. It will arrive as an accelerant.

It will pour intelligence directly onto foundations that are already cracked. Data models that never agreed. Integrations held together by assumptions. Information flows designed for humans to patch, not for machines to trust.

Digitalization allowed these weaknesses to remain hidden. Interfaces softened the edges. Dashboards reassured. Manual workarounds filled the gaps. It looked functional, even modern.

Agentic Commerce will remove that cover.

What was once manageable decay will become visible rot. What used to be slow data failures will turn immediate, amplified and impossible to ignore.

From data failure to reputational risk

If your product data is incomplete, Agentic Commerce will not stop. It will infer.
If your inventory truth is unstable, it will not verify. It will approximate.
If your integrations are brittle, it will not wait. It will act on partial signals.

Those guesses will not fail quietly. They will surface as confident but incorrect recommendations, broken delivery promises, inconsistent answers and automated decisions no one consciously approved.

Digitalization made it possible to postpone correctness by relying on humans to intervene when things went wrong.
Agentic Commerce removes that safety net.

Over time, the damage is not technical. It is reputational.

When agents repeatedly encounter conflicting attributes, unreliable availability, drifting prices or inconsistent semantics, they do not escalate the issue. They downgrade the source. Gradually, invisibly, a company becomes classified as unreliable.

In an agentic ecosystem, this is how brands decay.
Not through scandal or collapse, but by becoming a toxic data source.

And once systems learn to avoid you, there is no campaign, redesign or replatforming that brings you back into the decision layer.

The myth of easy progress

There is a comforting story many organizations still believe in. That progress can be purchased. That complexity can be bypassed. That the right platform, the right partner, or the right set of prebuilt integrations will quietly carry them into the future.

It is the same story digitalization has told for years. And it remains deeply attractive.

We want solutions that promise momentum without friction. One-click integrations. Ready-made connectors. Frameworks that claim to encode best practice. We want someone to juice us to success.

But data does not work that way.

Every real business is structurally unique. Products behave differently across markets. Definitions drift over time. Regulations evolve. Sustainability requirements add new layers. Logistics introduces uncertainty. Returns create feedback loops.

Each layer compounds complexity. None of it disappears just because intelligence is added on top.

Just last week, I heard a company say:
“We have such a strong brand that we don’t need to worry about Agentic Commerce. Customers will choose us anyway.”

Now, maybe I was born in the age of dinosaurs, but I had never heard of their brand.

That moment captures the illusion perfectly.

Agents do not recognize brands the way humans do.
They verify consistency.
They measure reliability.
They downgrade uncertainty.

In an agentic world, being well known is irrelevant if you are not well described.

Agentic Commerce is a channel, not a shortcut

Agentic Commerce should not be viewed as a replacement for existing channels, but as a new and increasingly important one.

Even when a transaction is not completed within an agent or chat interface, the buying journey may begin there. That interaction must be handled with the same level of accuracy, structure and reliability as if the purchase were finalized in that environment.

From a data and integration perspective, these interactions are transaction-critical. The moment an agent forms an opinion, filters options or recommends a path forward, the decision surface has already been crossed.

This is precisely why shortcuts become dangerous.

Doing it right is the hard path

There is no shortcut to readiness.

Doing this right requires investment.
Clear ownership of data.
Shared definitions that systems actually agree on.
Integrations designed for failure, latency and change.
Architectures built for evolution, not demos.
Governance that survives growth, not audits.

None of this looks good in marketing material. None of it is fast. And none of it can be skipped.

But it is the only foundation that holds when intelligence reaches the decision layer.

The future will not reward beauty alone

There will always be room for storytelling, design and emotional connection. But they will no longer be enough to earn visibility.

In an agent-driven world, you are not chosen because you look good.
You are chosen because your information holds up under scrutiny.

The companies that survive this shift will not be the ones who adopt Agentic Commerce first. They will be the ones who accept complexity, invest in correctness and resist easy answers.

Everyone else will keep polishing the surface while the foundations quietly rot.

Agentic Commerce does not create that decay.
It simply makes it impossible to ignore.

Martin Forsberg
Sparkhouse AB