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Agentic commerce dominated the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual conference in New York earlier this week. NRF launched its first dedicated AI Stage, featuring roundtables and panel discussions on agentic best practices, improving the ROI of AI, and how to use agents to build personalized experiences. Microsoft announced a new AI shopping experience, powered by Stripe, and Google introduced its own open standard for agentic commerce—both of which create a larger market opportunity for retailers.

During our time at NRF talking to hundreds of retailers and attending dozens of conference sessions, three key trends emerged. These trends reflect what we’ve seen over the past year: retailers are rapidly maturing their agentic commerce initiatives. Not only are the majority of retailers actively implementing, or have plans to implement, agentic commerce, but many are also moving to a more tactical phase of optimizing their setup—refining their product catalog strategy to launch faster and investing in their own agentic shopping experiences in addition to integrating with third-party agents. This is a stark contrast from what we saw just last summer, when retailer sentiment was primarily defined by hesitation and uncertainty.