Agentic commerce is not coming. It is here, quietly.

Everyone in this category is still arguing about citations. Meanwhile the thing that actually changes commerce shipped, got adopted by the largest platforms in the world, and nobody outside engineering noticed.

What actually happened

Model Context Protocol went from an Anthropic release↗(opens in a new tab) to something OpenAI, Google and Microsoft all support. Google published Agent2Agent↗(opens in a new tab) for agents that need to talk to each other. Both are open, both are documented, and both assume the thing on the other end can answer a structured question.

That last assumption is the whole story. A protocol is only as useful as the number of endpoints that speak it.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

Ask yourself what happens when an agent tries to buy something from an average small business website today.

It cannot read the price, because the price is in an image. It cannot check availability, because availability lives in a booking widget that renders after JavaScript. It cannot complete the purchase, because checkout assumes a human with a mouse. It gives up and recommends a competitor whose Shopify store happens to expose all three in markup.

None of that is a failure of AI. It is a failure of the website to be legible to anything that is not a person with eyes.

Why this is good news if you move now

Every technology shift has a window where the cost of being early is low and the benefit is disproportionate. Mobile had one. HTTPS had one. This one is open because the work is unglamorous — structured data, readable prices, a sitemap, an llms.txt — and unglamorous work is exactly what most businesses defer.

The businesses that do it in the next eighteen months will be the ones agents can actually transact with, at a point when very few can. That is not a marketing advantage. It is a mechanical one.

What I would actually do

Not much, and not expensively.

Put your prices in text. Mark up your opening hours. Make sure your content exists in the HTML before JavaScript runs. Publish an llms.txt. Add Organization schema with a real address.

That is a day of work and it moves you from invisible to legible. Whether an agent then chooses you is out of your hands — but it cannot choose you if it cannot read you.

The part nobody says

There is a reasonable argument that agentic commerce stays niche for years. Consumer habits move slowly, trust in autonomous purchasing is low, and the first high-profile agent-buys-the-wrong-thing story will set adoption back a year.

I think that is probably right about the timeline and wrong about the conclusion. The work required to be ready is the same work that makes you readable to ordinary assistants today, which are already answering millions of questions about businesses like yours. You get the near-term benefit either way. The agent readiness is a free option on top.