Agentic commerce blurs buyer-customer lines

This is less a branding question than a systems question. If agents become the front end of procurement, the winners will be the companies that make their products easy for machines to parse, trust, compare, and transact against.

• –McKinsey frames the shift bluntly: in agentic commerce, the “customer” can be an AI agent acting on a person’s behalf, which forces new thinking around delegated authorization and protocol-level trust.
• –PwC’s take is similar: brands need to be discoverable, trustworthy, structured, and transactable for AI agents, not just persuasive to humans.
• –The old marketing playbook still matters, but mostly at the final human approval step; earlier stages are becoming a data and workflow problem.
• –For B2B teams, product catalogs, pricing feeds, APIs, and policy rules start looking like core go-to-market assets, not backend plumbing.
• –The companies that treat agents as just another content channel will probably lose to competitors that treat them as the new buyer interface.