Merchant interest in agentic commerce is accelerating across payments and geography. A Forbes analysis of an S&P Global survey found that 65% of merchants strongly agree they're considering adding a new payment partner to support agentic commerce, and 55% believe AI agents will become a major new transaction channel. Two-thirds of merchants believe agents could initiate at least 10% of their e-commerce transactions within three years, with 94% citing pace of innovation as an important criterion when selecting a payments partner. Meanwhile, a Sopra Steria study of 8,400 European consumers across eight countries pegged the potential European agentic commerce market at north of €310 billion within ten years.
Trust and readiness gaps remain significant barriers. Only 41% of Europeans trust any single actor to provide a shopping agent, with banks emerging as the most trusted at 27%. Awareness of agentic commerce varies dramatically by geography, hitting 76% in Norway but only 38% in France. On the execution front, a DCG benchmark of manufacturers across 13 product categories found that while approximately 30% are building genuine AI capability, only about 10% have generated real actionability and under 5% are deriving measurable value; no manufacturer scored above 50% on any agentic-readiness question (Retailgentic).
For commerce practitioners, the convergence of merchant investment signals and consumer market size projections suggests agentic commerce is transitioning from experimental to strategic. The gap between leaders and laggards is not budget or technology, but execution and data foundation quality—fixing the product data layer first is critical before layering AI on top.