Wall St Event + Proposed Agentic Shopping Terminology

Join us tomorrow at 11am ET for a Wall St event and as an industry we need to nail down our vocabulary to avoid confusion.

Thanks to the Barrons and Wall St. Journal articles mentioned in our agentic week 25 update, Retailgentic has enjoyed an influx of public company retailers, brands, investors and analysts. That leads us to the first topic - we have our first conference related to Agentic Commerce tomorrow and you’re invited!

Wall St Analyst Call

Tomorrow, at 11am ET, June 25th, we’re a guest on Wedbush’s internet analyst Scott Devitt ‘Advisor call’:

If you’d like to attend, they have to ask some compliance questions first, email Matthew Weiss at wedbush. (matthew dot weiss at wedbush dot com).

Agentic Shopping Terminology

Earlier in the week, I was watching an Agentforce launch event from our friends at Salesforce. They spent a good bit of time talking about ‘Agentforce for Retail’ and had some really interesting new capabilities. From that webinar and also now closing in on hundreds of conversations on this topic, I realized, as an industry, if we’re not careful, we’re going to create a very confusing and complicated naming scheme.

Challenges

First, we’re overloading the term Agentic Shopping to mean too much. It’s used to cover all use cases from Perplexity Buy with Pro, Rufus, Sparky, Agents that build PDPs, Agents that answer customer support queries and so on.

Second, there’s a LOT of synonyms. I’ve been keeping notes and have heard Agentic, Agentic Retail, Agentic Commerce, Agentic Ecommerce, Agentic Buying.

Proposal-ish

I have a general rule where I don’t bring up a problem unless I have at least a first stab at a solution, and that’s what I have here. A start at how we can create a framework for terminology to hopefully avoid massive confusion we’re heading towards.

High-level

At a high-level there is the all-encompassing Agentic <X> - I prefer Shopping but use what you want. I think AI Shopping or GenAI is ‘ok’ and if we want to get nerdy is a line between Level 0/1/2 and Level 3 Agentic shopping - you can do all of 0/1/2 with GenAI, but you really need to be agentic. Anyway, that will sort itself out.

Inside of there is where I think we need to be more precise:

• Agentic Shopping Engines and/or Buyer Agents

• Personal Shopping Assistants

• Seller Shopping Agents or Retailer/Brand/Merchant Shopping Agents

• Infrastructure Agents

Here’s some thinking on each category.

Agentic Shopping Engines

This one is could be controversial, but I like calling this category Agentic Shopping Engines. First, it’s a call back to Comparison Shopping Engines, so it ties the (distant) past to the future. Second, it’s easy to TLA as ASE. As you’ve gathered by this point, I spend a LOT of time thinking about and writing about this stuff. Each time I use ASE that’s 21 characters I saved. My fingers thank you 🫡.

Within the category of ASEs, there’s one nuance we need to think about. Amazon’s ‘Buy for me’ functionality is Retailer→Brand where as all the other ASEs are ‘ASE→Retailer or brand’. For example, Perplexity will buy from Best Buy or Nike.com. Amazon and any other retailers that build similar capabilities (and I predict they will) will never, ever ever shop another retailer’s site, but they may send you down-stream to a partner-brand DTC experience. I’ve taken a stab and called these Multi-retailer and single-retailer, but don’t 100% love this yet. I’m open to ideas and feedback on this one.

Personal Shopping Assistants

Notably missing from my definition of ASEs (saved 21 again yeah!) is the on-site retailer GenAI chat bots like Rufus, Sparky and Mylow (Lowes - love the red vest!) . To nerd out again, I don’t think these are agentic. Maybe under the hood they are, but to the user it feels more genai - this system has been personalized on your transactions and the retailers product catalog, reviews, etc. and it’s not going to leave the site to do anything for you.

Note to our friends at Home Depot - please please please, have your PSA be an animated orange bucket named Bucky 🙏

Seller Shopping Agents

This one’s a place holder. Some day a retailer and/or brand’s agent (the selling agent) is going to talk to the ASE’s buyer agent and they are going to talk about products, pricing, loyalty, etc.

If we don’t put some qualifiers on this it will get confusing fast. ASEs always represent the buyer or shopper and I think we use seller agent or Agentic merchant or something here. Open to ideas.

Infrastructure Agents

Finally, and this is inspired from the Salesforce webinar. A lot of people are using ‘Agentic commerce’ for what I would call an ecommerce (online-oriented) or retail (offline-oriented) infrastructure agent. It’s behind the scenes for the most part.

Feedback Welcome!

As mentioned, this is a start, let’s work together as an industry and figure out what we call all these agents that are going to be running around so we don’t all get super confused.