Agentic commerce is overhyped now, underpriced soon
The author argues agent shopping is rough today and mainstream users haven't adopted it, but volume will surge in 3–6 months and products not optimized for agents will be left behind.
Agentic commerce is undeniably overhyped based on current usage ...but, I'd be willing to bet it's massively underhyped based on volume agents will drive in ~3-6 months. And, if you're not optimizing your product (software, service, or physical good) for agents, you'll be left behind. Why? 1. As Maia's demo shows - agents are much improved, but still nowhere near perfect. 99% of consumers will churn off an agent if there are any issues or delays. Browser use is still slow / buggy and the ecosystem of connectors / plug-ins available on these agents are nascent. Similarly - saving down credentials, handling payments, etc. all have too much friction and uncertainty now. This will all be solved over time. 2. The VAST majority of consumers still are not using agents. Pick a person off the street in any city other than SF, and they have likely heard of neither Muse nor Instinct. These products have (so far) done a fantastic job optimizing for the workflows / use cases of high income, tech-forward SV users. They are still early in doing things that are valuable for the mainstream user on a repeatable basis (retention), especially while being able to offer the product for free. This will likely involve unlocking network effects (yes, some consumer agents now are multiplayer but usage is fairly low) and giving people ways to make money / spend time vs. save money / save time (@ekuyda's thesis!) Model costs coming down will help here too. 3. "Agents" right now generally refer to standalone harnesses built for consumers to use (Instinct, Muse, Fo, Tomo, Pally, Folk, Tab, Daimon and many others). These products will continue to grow - and consumers will interact with agentic models more frequently via products like ChatGPT (now at 1.2B WAUs), that can now complete purchases instead of just recommending products. As ChatGPT rolls out its wallet and more developers connect plug-ins, I could see a massive increase in % of LLM queries that lead to in-chat transactions. And, early data shows that AI-driven traffic is actually higher conversion and intent than non-AI commerce traffic.
This post quotes another post: x.com/maiab/status/2117616124338778173