Every decade, commerce reinvents itself. First came the migration from physical to digital storefronts. Then, the shift from desktop to mobile transformed how consumers discovered and made purchases. Now, we stand at the edge of another profound transition: the rise of agentic AI.
This isn’t just another personalization tool; Agentic AI acts. It can initiate, evaluate, and even complete purchases on behalf of your customers. But it won’t stop there. Businesses will utilize agents to optimize their supply chains, orchestrate payments, and personalize customer experiences. And, just as inevitably, fraudsters will use agents to probe vulnerabilities at scale.
The question is no longer if this will reshape your business; it’s whether you’ll be ready when it does. To help you prepare, Forter partnered with leaders across commerce — AWS, Shopify, Spreedly, Checkout.com, and ESW — to unpack what this shift means for you, and how to position your business to win.
AWS: Building the Agentic AI Ecosystem
Vince Koh, Global Head, Digital Commerce
The story of agentic AI is not the rise of a single new tool, but the emergence of a new ecosystem. AWS sees three types of agents taking shape, each with transformative implications for commerce.
- Customer Experience Agents that collapse search and discovery into intent-based requests. A shopper can simply ask for “a Mother’s Day gift under $100″ or “running shoes for winter,” and the agent assembles a complete personalized recommendation set.
- Trust and Security Agents that quietly protect every interaction with real-time fraud checks, risk scoring, and identity verification.
- Operation Agents that coordinate pricing, inventory, and logistics in real time, like Amazon Bedrock’s Multi-Agent Collaboration — agents that simultaneously process weather data, stock levels, and customer preferences to make smarter business decisions
The AWS AI Agents and Tools category of AWS Marketplace enables enterprises to identify, test, and launch solutions in days — often using funds built into existing agreements. With Bedrock AgentCore, leaders can confidently deploy agents that handle payments and customer data without compromising security. And by embracing industry standards like MCP and A2A, AWS makes it possible to combine agents without replacing existing infrastructure.
Key takeaway: Bold experimentation, anchored in secure and interoperable ecosystems, will define the leaders in the AI era.
Shopify: The New Front Door to Commerce
Mujtaba Khambatti, Director of Product, AI Shopping Experiences & Ellen Dunne, Director of Product, AI Shopping Experiences
Shopify leaders predict that the next two years will witness the most fundamental shift in commerce since the internet: shopping will become conversational. Not through chatbots mimicking human agents, but through AI that understands intent, context, and preference as naturally as a trusted advisor.
When a customer asks their AI assistant to find a specific product, merchants have milliseconds to be discovered, understood, and trusted. The winners won’t be those with the best keywords or biggest ad budgets, but those whose product data and brand stories are structured for AI comprehension.
Shopify’s data architecture is already LLM-ready by default, unlocking the world’s largest structured product feed — encompassing millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of products — for AI shopping. Shopify’s Knowledge Base app ensures that AI agents can answer questions that go beyond the product catalog, like shipping and return policies and brand narratives, by translating this information into LLM-readable FAQs that brands can customize.
Key takeaway: The stores of tomorrow won’t be defined by their websites, but by how well they show up in agentic conversations. Success belongs to merchants who make their products discoverable, their policies transparent, and their brand voice authentic across every AI touchpoint. The conversation has already started.
Spreedly: Control in a Distributed Checkout World
Andy McHale, Senior Director of Product and Market Strategy
The next era of commerce won’t always unfold on a merchant’s website. Voice assistants, chat platforms, and embedded commerce surfaces are increasingly handling transactions directly. The opportunity is reach. The risk is losing visibility and control over how money actually moves.
Spreedly leaders see that the answer lies in payment orchestration as a strategic control plane. Orchestration enables merchants to maintain oversight even when checkout is distributed. Sensitive data remains secure through tokenization and vaulting. Account-updating services ensure payment methods don’t lapse. Dynamic routing maximizes approvals based on geography, risk, or cost. And critically, orchestration provides observability — capturing transaction data across providers and channels, even when merchants don’t own the flow.
Key takeaway: As checkout becomes distributed, orchestration becomes indispensable. Without it, enterprises risk disintermediation from their own revenue streams; with it, they remain in command.
Checkout.com: The New Sales Channel of the Age
Rami Josef, Director of Product Management
Traditionally, payments have been engineered for a world where human buyers drive the process: select, confirm, authorize, pay. Agentic AI flips that model on its head. Tomorrow’s transactions may be initiated, verified, and settled in microseconds — without a human ever clicking “buy.”
This shift demands more than incremental updates; it requires infrastructure designed for autonomy at scale. API-driven connectivity must allow money to move seamlessly across merchants, banks, card networks, and machine agents in real time. Every delay, decline, or data mismatch becomes a point of friction. And every unchecked gap becomes an entry point for fraudsters.
That’s why Checkout.com frames PSP modernization not as adding tender types, but as re-architecting payments for an always-on, global environment where machines transact at the speed of algorithms. They sit in the middle of banks, card companies, merchants, consumers, AI agents, and identity intelligence platforms like Forter, as the connective tissue that helps the system flow.
Key takeaway: Merchants must invest in PSP optimization built for autonomous, cross-border, real-time transactions.
ESW: Turning Global Complexity into Advantage
Richard Brennan, VP, Product Management
AI agents won’t stop at domestic borders. When tasked with finding the fastest, most seamless way to deliver what a consumer wants, they will scan globally — favoring merchants who can make international commerce as easy as local shopping.
This raises the bar. Cross-border commerce has always been complex with multiple currencies, tax regimes, compliance rules, and logistics networks. With autonomous agents, the tolerance for friction all but disappears.
ESW emphasizes that merchants must re-architect their foundations to stay competitive. Commerce functions must be modular and API-driven. Data flows must be real-time, enabling agents to act on context instantly. And infrastructure must adapt dynamically by adjusting checkout flows, surfacing compliant payment methods, or rerouting logistics based on local disruptions.
Key takeaway: What’s evolving is not just the technology, but the mindset. Localization is no longer a marketing function but a systems capability. The brands that succeed in this new landscape will be those that view global scale not as a barrier to personalisation, but as the foundation for it.
Thriving in the Age of Agentic AI
Agentic AI is reshaping how customers shop, how businesses operate, and how fraudsters attack. In this new environment, every gap in trust, speed, or transparency is a reason for an agent to route the transaction somewhere else, or worse, exploit it.
But you don’t have to lose ground. The same dynamics that create risk also create opportunity. If you build the foundations that agents reward — secure ecosystems, chat-native storefronts, orchestrated payments, modern PSP infrastructure, and seamless global scale — you’ll put yourself on the path to growth.
At Forter, we believe trust is the currency of this new age. Consumer agents, business agents, and even fraudster agents all operate at machine speed — and merchants who establish real-time, reliable trust will win. Together with our partner ecosystem, we’re here to help you build that trust at scale, across the entire digital commerce journey.
