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. 

Let’s take a closer look at how agentic commerce is maturing among retailers.

Retailers are shifting from “if” to “how” on agentic commerce 

Over the past year, retailers have shifted from asking whether agentic commerce is viable to focusing on how to implement it at scale—without giving up trust, brand, or control.

At NRF, that change was echoed in audience data: during our session on agentic commerce in action, a live audience survey showed that almost 75% of attendees were either currently implementing or actively planning agentic commerce initiatives. 

We’ve seen this growth ourselves: leading brands have already onboarded to our Agentic Commerce Suite, such as URBN (including Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters), Etsy, Ashley Furniture, Coach, Kate Spade, Nectar, Revolve, Halara, and Abt Electronics. And more than 25 partners across the ecosystem—including Salesforce, Squarespace, and PwC—have announced their endorsement of our Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).

The momentum extended to platform-level infrastructure. Stripe announced that it’s helping power a new shopping experience: Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout, which will enable Copilot users in the US to buy products from Etsy businesses and retailers such as Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie—all without leaving the chat. This marks Stripe’s second major AI agent integration, following our support for Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, as we continue building infrastructure that connects retailers to AI-powered shopping experiences.

Google announced its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF, adding another live protocol to the market alongside existing standards such as ACP. The arrival of UCP validates the growth of the agentic economy and the ecosystem Stripe is helping to build. And for retailers using Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite, supporting Google’s UCP will require no additional integration—the Agentic Commerce Suite will automatically support all agentic protocols through a single setup.

Agent-ready catalogs are being built incrementally, not all at once

Almost every retailer we spoke to asked the same question: what does “good” product data look like for AI agents? Optimizing product catalogs for agents was a recurring theme across sessions. Yelena Reznikova, who manages B2B partnerships at OpenAI, discussed the importance of structured product feeds. The best way to capture intent and surface the right products at the right time, she said, is to have structured product feeds with clean, up-to-date item descriptions, pricing, and product availability.

However, this can be challenging for retailers with massive product catalogs. URBN has thousands of SKUs across its portfolio of consumer brands, for example.  

During our session on agentic commerce in action, URBN CIO Rob Frieman said the company found success by starting small and focused. Rather than attempting to optimize its entire product catalog at once, the company narrowed its scope. URBN focused first on popular categories such as dresses and denim, standardizing language, attributes, and taxonomy where the impact would be highest.

“You don’t want to tackle everything out of the gate,” Rob said. “We have a very broad product catalog across all of our brands. We wanted to focus on some of our most popular products and use cases that were going to provide high value early.”

Retailers are launching their own agentic shopping experiences

Across retailer conversations at NRF, one of the biggest themes was loyalty. Retailers told us that they wanted to know how to maintain customer relationships and increase loyalty when shopping happens via AI agents. 

For many, the answer lies in creating native, personalized AI shopping experiences as a complement to integrating with third-party AI agents. For example, Home Depot’s AI companion, Magic Apron, is only available on its website and provides specialized customer support. With access to customer and purchase data that third-party agents lack, Magic Apron can offer a more personalized service that taps into existing consumer trust with the brand. 

We heard a similar example from David Lauren, the chief branding and innovation officer at Ralph Lauren Corporation, during his keynote session. In September, Ralph Lauren launched Ask Ralph, an AI-powered virtual shopping tool that creates shoppable outfit combinations, personalized to a user’s prompts, from its men’s and women’s Polo collections.

“Nobody needs a flannel shirt,” said David. “Showing a customer how to put it together is what makes us unique.”

These examples show that rather than an either-or choice, the future of agentic commerce will include both third-party agentic platforms for discovery and first-party AI experiences for deeper brand engagement. Retailers are building for both experiences to meet customers where they prefer to shop.

How Stripe can help retailers launch agentic commerce

We’re building infrastructure for leading retailers to successfully navigate this new era of commerce. Our Agentic Commerce Suite will help you get agent-ready by allowing you to connect your product catalog to Stripe and then, in just a few clicks in the Stripe Dashboard, you will be able to select which AI agents you’d like to sell through. From there, Stripe helps with checkout, payments, and fraud detection, and will send you order events so you can continue using your existing commerce stack.   

To learn more about the Agentic Commerce Suite, sign up for the waitlist and read our integration guides.