Retail is on the cusp of the most profound shift we’ve seen since the rise of e-commerce. Throughout the past year, one theme dominated my conversations with technologists, payment network providers, retailers and more: agentic commerce.

This isn’t a futuristic concept. It’s already emerging. Shoppers are already using artificial intelligence agents to research, compare and buy on their behalf. And just as brands once had to adapt to e-commerce, mobile, digital payments, and search engine optimization, we’re entering another and potentially even bigger disruption that will redefine how customers discover, evaluate and buy.

At Synchrony, we’ve been preparing for this shift through partnerships with Mastercard, Visa, digital wallet providers and leading retail brands. We’re building new capabilities, testing agentic workflows, and helping partners imagine what commerce looks like when decision-making moves from consumers to agents acting on their behalf.

Here are the three things brand leaders should be thinking about right now as agentic commerce accelerates:

1. AI Agents Are Emerging as a Front Door to Your Brand

For decades, retail has optimized for human decision-making through brand storytelling, visual merchandising, frictionless user experience, loyalty programs, and more.

But in an agentic world, the first “customer” encountering your product may not be a person. It may be:

  •     A replenishment agent that manages inventory by predicting demands.
  •     A financial agent matching purchases to a customer’s suggested budget and rewards.
  •     A wellness agent scanning ingredient lists or sustainability ratings.
  •     A household-management agent predicting needs before the shopper realizes them.

This requires brands to think beyond traditional customer journeys. Your product data, policies, pricing and attributes need to be machine-readable, transparent, and optimized for AI evaluation because these agents will increasingly influence or even execute the purchase.

At Synchrony, we’re supporting agent-ready infrastructure, including machine-readable loyalty and financing signals, and trust frameworks that allow brands and agents to interact with clarity and confidence. When e-commerce disrupted the point of sale and search reshaped discovery, we worked with brands to adapt — and we’re now partnering with them again as we enter this AI era.

2. Trust and Transparency Will Become Critical 

AI agents should be designed to operate on rules their human owners set, including value, cost, rewards, financing, speed and other parameters that personalize shopping to them. That means retailers must prepare their data, policies and brand reputation to stand up to algorithmic scrutiny.

AI agents will look for clear and structured product information, transparent pricing and fees, easy-to-understand financing options, what discounts or rewards come with it, and signals that reinforce brand trustworthiness (e.g., reviews or sales data).

This is a massive opportunity for brand leaders. The brands that win will be the ones whose brand, product differentiators, financing and rewards are machine-readable so AI can evaluate them and choose them on behalf of the person for whom they’re shopping.

Synchrony is supporting this foundation across our agentic commerce work by designing solutions for our retail partners that integrate with AI agents. Through direct agent integrations, we aim to enhance product discovery while reinforcing differentiated value propositions, including financing, rewards, discounts and more. Therefore, when someone is deciding what it is they want to buy, the AI agents are assessing the full picture. Synchrony is leaning in here with our retail partners to help ensure that we can enable trusted agents to discover and choose our partners via our payment rails.

3. Retailers Need to Pilot and Prepare Now, Before Agents Set the Terms

History has been clear: when technology shifts consumer expectations (SEO; mobile; click-to-pay; buy now, pay later), retailers that prepare early outperform later adopters. Agentic commerce is no different. As consumers increasingly leverage AI agents for product and financing option discovery and purchase, retailers must start answering critical questions now:

  • How will your brand show up in agent-driven marketplaces?
  • How do financing, loyalty and promotions translate into agent language?
  • What protections do you need so your product is accurately and holistically represented to agents?

Early pilots will accelerate learning — testing agent-friendly product feeds, integrating flexible financing and rewards logic, creating guardrails for brand consistency, and simulating how autonomous agents will interact with your catalog, checkout and loyalty programs.

We’re also actively working on our own Synchrony Agent that will operate in our Synchrony Marketplace, allowing shoppers to ask the agent to discover and then buy the products they’re searching for from our retail partners. This allows us to lean into the mechanics that unlock an agentic shopping experience, including the underlying trust signals that need to be present, especially in a scenario where our agent transacts via guest checkout.  We will also be able to observe how the “chat” between the human buyer and AI shopping agent happens within our agent and what the conversational nature of generative AI does to the underlying shopping experience. The goal: make it seamless for our partners and their customers by building the trusted integrations for them.

That research, combined with the deployment of an integrated, multipronged strategy, will allow us to guide partners through readiness assessments, new types of product metadata, and ways to make their financial offers and loyalty signals perform in any agent-led environment.

Why This Matters Now

Agentic commerce isn’t about replacing the human shopper; it’s about empowering them. The brands that act now will shape and lead this shift. It’s the next chapter, and we’re building it with the same spirit of partnership, experimentation and customer-first innovation that has defined every era before. I’m excited about the challenges and opportunities my team and I get to tackle, and as retail industry leaders, I hope you’re excited for this next era as well.

If we get this right, we won’t just prepare for the future of commerce. We’ll succeed in our continuing goal of bringing value to customers and partners.

Rachel Moore is the senior vice president of incubation and emerging payments at Synchrony.