The agentic commerce gold rush risks repeating ecommerce's biggest mistakes

Agentic commerce has become the latest obsession in ecommerce.

The technology is certainly compelling. Instead of consumers browsing websites, comparing products and making purchases themselves, AI agents increasingly do the work for them. They search, compare, recommend and transact on our behalf. According to the hype, agentic commerce has the potential to transform the way we shop online.

It is easy to see why merchants are excited. For an industry under constant pressure to drive growth, improve efficiency, capture shoppers' attention, and deliver better customer experiences, agentic commerce promises a great deal. Some believe it could become as significant as the shift to mobile commerce. Others see it as the next logical evolution of ecommerce itself.

Whether those predictions prove accurate remains to be seen. New technologies often arrive surrounded by hype. Not all of them live up to expectations.

But retailers are taking agentic commerce seriously. Many are moving rapidly to integrate it into their businesses. No one wants to be left behind when a new technology goldrush gathers momentum.

That urgency is understandable. But it should also give us pause for thought. Every new development in ecommerce has brought with it new opportunities for fraud. Online payments made shopping more convenient but opened the door to card-not-present fraud.

Mobile commerce transformed how consumers shop but introduced new security challenges. More recently, AI has begun reshaping how businesses work while simultaneously giving fraudsters powerful new tools to scale attacks. There is little reason to believe agentic will be any different

The pattern is familiar: innovation creates opportunity, fraudsters adapt, and businesses scramble to catch up. Agentic commerce has all the ingredients to follow a similar path.

Part of the reason adoption is moving so quickly is that ecommerce growth has become harder. Competition is intense and customer acquisition costs remain stubbornly high. No wonder many merchants are searching for new ways to improve efficiency.

Early adoption of AI agents appears to offer the golden ticket solution. They promise faster transactions, less friction and greater automation at a time when growth is harder to achieve. The challenge is ensuring that risk management keeps pace.

Are we trusting AI agents too much?

One of the more interesting aspects of the agentic commerce debate is the level of trust many businesses are already placing in AI systems. That may sound surprising until you consider the reality facing many merchants today.

Customer fraud continues to grow. Refund abuse, chargeback fraud, promotion abuse and policy exploitation have become major challenges for ecommerce businesses. Our own extensive polling of merchants shows many place greater trust in the promise of AI agents than in their own customers.

On the face of it, AI agents are attractive. They appear predictable. They follow instructions. They don't deliberately manipulate systems for personal gain. But it's crucial to understand replacing one source of risk with another is not the same as eliminating risk altogether.

AI agents may not behave like human fraudsters, but they introduce new vulnerabilities that businesses are only now beginning to understand. More on that shortly.

The accountability problem

One of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding agentic commerce centers on liability.

If an AI agent makes a poor purchasing decision, where does accountability sit? If a fraudulent transaction takes place, who is liable? If an agent is manipulated into making purchases it shouldn't make, who is responsible for the resulting losses? The consumer? The retailer? The technology provider? The operator of the agent itself?

The problem is existing frameworks were built around human decision-making. Agentic commerce introduces a new layer of autonomy that blurs traditional lines of responsibility. At the moment, many of these questions remain unresolved.

That doesn't mean businesses should avoid agentic commerce. But it does mean they should think carefully about governance, oversight and accountability before deploying it at scale. Trust cannot simply be assumed because a transaction is being conducted by an AI agent.

Merchants need visibility over who is operating that agent, how decisions are being made and what safeguards exist when things go wrong.

Fraudsters will move quickly

If history teaches us anything, it is that criminals are among the fastest adopters of new technology. While businesses focus on the opportunities created by innovation, fraudsters focus on the weaknesses. Agentic commerce is likely to create plenty of both.

We will see attempts to hijack legitimate agents and manipulate their behavior. Fraudsters could also create fake agents that impersonate trusted services or brands. Criminal networks may also deploy their own autonomous agents to identify vulnerabilities and exploit them at scale.

Promotions, loyalty schemes and refund processes will almost certainly also become targets for increasingly sophisticated forms of automated abuse.

What makes this new environment particularly challenging is the speed of evolution. Most forms of online fraud still require a degree of human input. Autonomous agents have the potential to operate around the clock, making decisions, testing vulnerabilities and exploiting weaknesses at machine speed, as well as adapting their tactics automatically when they fail.

The result may not be more fraud in absolute terms, but we will see more sophisticated and fast-moving threats. That will require merchants to rethink how they identify risk, monitor activity and respond.

Proceed, but with your eyes open

None of this should be interpreted as an argument against agentic commerce. The technology has genuine potential. It could make shopping easier, reduce friction and unlock new opportunities for both consumers and businesses. But innovation and risk have always evolved together.

The companies that succeed in the next phase of ecommerce will not necessarily be those that move first. They will be the organizations that understand the risks as well as the opportunities. That means understanding their own data.

Maintaining visibility over customer and transaction behavior and continuously monitoring for unusual activity means controls can be adapted as new threats emerge.

In a world where both shoppers and fraudsters may increasingly be represented by AI, capturing diverse data at scale and knowing how to interpret it to protect against online crime and serve good customers better will become more important than ever.

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