Saurabh Vijayvergia & Bryan McCarthy from Deloitte on Trust, Catalogs, and the Real Agentic Commerce Stack

Saurabh Vijayvergia and Brian McCarthy break down Agentic Commerce, the SEO→GEO→ACO shift, and why product + data catalogs are the no-regret starting point.

Feb 12, 2026

This episode features two leaders from Deloitte who are working at the center of AI, retail, and enterprise transformation every day.

Saurabh Vijayvergia is Deloitte’s US Retail AI Strategy & Engineering Lead, operating at the intersection of retail strategy and hands-on AI implementation. He works closely with large retailers on how to design, build, and operationalize AI-driven commerce systems, from data foundations to agent orchestration.

Brian McCarthy is Deloitte’s Retail & Consumer Products Strategy Leader. With two decades of experience spanning supply chain, merchandising, technology, and corporate strategy, Bryan helps retailers and brands decide where to place their bets, how to deploy capital, and how new channels like agentic commerce reshape unit economics and operating models.

Together, they recently authored “Agentic Commerce: Redefining Retail Economics,” a paper that quickly became one of the most referenced frameworks for understanding how commerce shifts when agents, not humans, become the primary interface.

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

There’s a fundamental difference between adding AI to today’s ecommerce workflows and re-architecting commerce for an agent-driven world.

In this episode, we start with Deloitte’s Agentic Commerce paper and quickly fan out into what’s changed since its release. If you’re trying to separate signal from noise in the rush toward AI-powered shopping, this conversation grounds Agentic Commerce in real systems, real economics, and real decisions retailers need to make now.

Highlights

Why Agentic Commerce is a paradigm shift, not a bundle of AI features
The evolution from SEO → GEO → ACO, and why GEO is just a waypoint
The two biggest misconceptions Deloitte is hearing from retailers and brands
Why structured product + data catalogs are the no-regret investment
The real question execs keep asking: Where do we start? (and what’s measurable)
The “Acommerce ecosystem”: orchestrators + specialized “nano agents”
Trust, security, returns, customer service, and why this can’t be a side project
Forecasts for how big agentic commerce gets, and why the point is: it moves the needle

Agentic commerce is becoming a new channel with new unit economics, and the brands and retailers that get their product truth, governance, and trust foundations right now will be the ones that win when agents become the default interface.

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