What agentic commerce means for CXOs and B2B buying
Agentic commerce, like ChatGPT shopping, could streamline B2B product procurement. But enterprise infrastructure, security and purchasing validation processes need to be figured out.
Shopping in ChatGPT is here. What started as people asking OpenAI's chatbot for product recommendations has now evolved into ChatGPT shopping and Instant Checkout, where a conversational agent can discover products, compare them and complete the transaction inside the chat experience.
For chief experience officers in B2B and enterprise environments, agentic commerce is a signal that procurement, sales and digital commerce are about to change.
"In the past, you would search Google, click to a merchant's site and transact there," said Tom Coshow, a senior director analyst at Gartner. "Now the commerce comes to the large language model chatbot instead of the other way around."
This shift has massive implications for how CIOs, CTOs and other executives architect their systems, govern their data and think about customer and buyer relationships.
What Instant Checkout changes
At a basic level, ChatGPT shopping with Instant Checkout moves the storefront into the conversation. Instead of sending a user out to a browser window, ChatGPT presents product carousels from participating merchants, helps narrow choices and, using stored payment credentials, executes the transaction.
More fundamentally, the model creates what Coshow calls a "very streamlined procurement process" for both B2C and B2B buying processes. In an ideal state, the LLM knows the buyer's preferences, has a secure file on the user to store data like price thresholds and preferred vendors and uses sovereign memory to source products, negotiate and execute orders on the buyer's behalf.
"In B2B, when you are doing procurement, there's a lot of information about what you buy, who you buy from and how fast you need it," Coshow said. "All of that can become a block of memory that you want baked into your AI procurement agent."
Infrastructure may not be ready for agentic commerce
The majority of large retailers are just scratching the surface of agentic commerce, said Katie Riddle, global retail strategy lead at Verizon Business. "What they don't realize is that to implement AI in the customer experience, you have to have a lot of bandwidth, low latency and compute available. If it takes three to five seconds to get a response back, that is eons in digital time."
For CXOs, the first order of business is to stress-test the network and foundational systems that would support ChatGPT shopping workloads. This includes testing the following network components:
Connectivity to ensure upstream and downstream bandwidth.
Latency and edge computing to keep experiences fast.
Data plumbing to flow CRM, point-of-sale (POS), product, customer and payment data into one unified data lake for controlled exposure.
Shore up security for agentic commerce
From a security perspective, agentic commerce extends the attack surface. AI agents may have access to payment tokens, customer profiles, inventory systems and vendor portals. Riddle sees sophisticated businesses experimenting with network slicing and zero-trust security to safeguard company assets. At the same time, many mid-tier companies "haven't even switched their POS to the cloud" and are still weak in basics like endpoint management and credential hygiene.
"The more endpoints, the more at risk you are," she said. "We still see the same issues, like ransomware and credentials not being deprovisioned when people leave, plus breaches through novel surfaces people don't realize are connected, like HVAC systems or vendor access."
Coshow stressed that payment is the most sensitive part of Instant Checkout, but he expects merchants, payment processors and OpenAI to treat those flows with the same rigor as existing ecommerce. The bigger risk comes from the way LLMs behave under uncertainty.
"AI tends to make things up when it's missing information, which could be extremely damaging in contract negotiations or invoice processing," he said. Enterprises will need multiple guardrails, sanity checks and deterministic validation layers around any agent that can commit funds.
In a B2B procurement scenario, this means providing the agent with detailed purchasing rules and then enforcing a final, rule-based validation step before any order is actually placed.
Coshow anticipates that by 2027 AI agents will play a big part in B2B procurement, but he draws a sharp line between agents with a human in the loop and fully autonomous agents.
Agentic commerce in its infancy
Dustin Engel, founder and principal consultant of Elegant Disruption, said he believes the biggest dividing line in the era of ChatGPT shopping will not be who integrates Instant Checkout first, but which organizations truly become AI-native.
"For an organization to maximize the opportunity in agentic commerce, it has to have a hands-on understanding of how AI works," he said. "When we start an AI consulting project, we ask the founder or CEO, 'Are you an active AI user?' If they say no, that is the project. For your organization to adopt AI, it has to start from the top."
B2B companies may have an advantage, as many already use AI agents within their existing software platforms. "Once more B2B opportunities become visible in AI, I think B2B is going to move faster than B2C has in the last couple of years," Engel said.
Instant Checkout is not yet a mainstream B2B procurement channel, but it's a visible sign of where digital commerce is heading.
For CXOs, ChatGPT shopping and Instant Checkout are less about a single integration with OpenAI and more about preparing for a world where AI agents intermediate more of the buying and selling journey.
Instant Checkout is not yet a mainstream B2B procurement channel, but it's a visible sign of where digital commerce is heading. Enterprises that use this moment to become AI native, shore up their infrastructure and experiment thoughtfully will be better positioned when their customers, partners and competitors move more of their buying into ChatGPT and other AI agents.
Christine Campbell is a freelance writer specializing in business and B2B technology.
