My co-founder Navam spends 10 hours a day building AI agents. Last month, one couldn't sell him a pair of shoes.

He was heading to Goa and needed waterproof shoes for the monsoon. He asked Claude, then ChatGPT - figured he'd let his 'servant' handle it. The experience was so bad he gave up and ordered manually on Amazon.

That story tells you where agentic commerce actually is, versus where the hype says it is. Every summit right now is buzzing about AI agents doing your customers' shopping. Meanwhile the protocols are still being fought over, checkout inside AI apps keeps getting walked back, and a guy who builds this stuff for a living couldn't complete one purchase.

Still, it would be a mistake to conclude none of it matters yet.

The buying layer and the discovery layer are on completely different timelines. Buying is broken. Discovery is already live. People ask ChatGPT what to buy and then complete the purchase somewhere else - Shopify's data shows orders referred from AI chats grew 13x in the past year, and those are people who decided inside a chat window and checked out on a storefront.

Which means the AI can't sell your product yet, but it's already deciding whether to recommend it. That decision is made from structured data and from what other people have written about you, not from your brand's own narrative.

So notice the agentic checkout hype, but don't reorganize your roadmap around it. The no-regret work is unglamorous: accurate product titles and descriptions, complete specs and attributes, clean schema markup, real stock and price data, and crawlers allowed to read your catalog. All of that pays off today in a channel that already exists, and it's the same groundwork the buying layer will need whenever it arrives.

Be findable now. Be buyable later. The second one will sort itself out - Navam's shoes are proof it hasn't yet.