AI agents won’t kill shopping – but agentic commerce could make most of it redundant

What if 90% of shopping is a complete waste of time?

And despite what others might tell you, I don’t just say that as a mildly-unfashionable middle-aged man who hates everything to do with the experience of buying things.

Instead, this question came into focus during a recent discussion with Andrew Bialecki and Chano Fernández, co-CEOs of marketing automation company Klaviyo, about the shift from e-commerce to agentic commerce — and then further still into what they call “agentic experience.”

And while their examples are early, they point to a broader shift.

Because if agents take over the work of finding, evaluating, and purchasing products on our behalf, then most of what we think of as shopping — outside of the occasional in-person social experience — starts to look less like a meaningful activity and more like background infrastructure.

No searching. No marketplaces. No defaulting to familiar brands.

Which raises an uncomfortable ...