At NRF 2026, agentic AI was everywhere. At SAP, we’re moving beyond the hype and turning AI into real, scalable outcomes. Agentic AI represents a fundamental change in how commerce works, reshaping discovery, payments, fulfillment, and long-term customer loyalty.
Our vision for agentic commerce is bold. In our latest video, we showcase a future where humans and AI agents collaborate to drive intelligent recommendations, proactive operations, efficient business processes, and deeper customer relationships. While this vision points forward, SAP’s focus is firmly grounded in helping retailers take practical steps today. This isn’t about flashy demos of a distant future—it’s about building the foundation now for how consumers will buy and retailers will sell in the years ahead.
Unlike traditional AI systems that respond to prompts, agentic systems act on intent. They learn from preferences, make proactive recommendations, and can complete transactions on a shopper’s behalf. These agents are increasingly becoming the starting point of the buying journey, reshaping how brands compete for visibility, trust, and loyalty.
This evolution introduces both opportunity and risk. As AI agents mediate more interactions between brands and consumers, retailers must rethink how they capture intent, transact with agents, and deliver post-purchase experiences that reinforce trust.
Discovery is moving from search to assistants
Historically, product discovery revolved around search engines, marketplaces, and brand-owned storefronts. That model is shifting quickly. Answer engines and AI shopping agents are becoming new entry points for commerce—often before a shopper ever visits a retailer’s site.
Like marketplaces before them, AI agents introduce a new layer between brands and customers. The difference is speed and autonomy. Agents don’t just surface options; they reason, decide, and act.
For retailers, success is no longer about ranking on a page. It’s about ensuring products are visible, understandable, and trusted by machines that influence purchase decisions on behalf of humans.
At NRF, SAP expanded its agentic commerce vision with the announcement of the storefront MCP server for SAP Commerce Cloud, planned for Q2 availability. The storefront model context protocol (MCP) server can enable channel-less commerce by allowing businesses to safely and reliably engage with multiple AI agents—whether embedded in a retailer’s own experiences or originating from third-party assistants like ChatGPT or Perplexity.
The storefront MCP server helps merchants surface products and can enable buying across channels for both people and machines. It’s the first of many steps SAP is taking to help customers fully participate in agentic commerce by supporting MCP, ACP, UCP, and other emerging agentic protocols.
Product content becomes the currency of visibility
In an agent-driven world, product content is no longer just marketing—it’s operational infrastructure. AI agents cannot recommend what they cannot interpret. Every attribute, image, specification, availability signal, and proof point directly impacts whether a product is surfaced, compared, or selected.
This is where generative engine optimization (GEO) is evolving. Optimization must now serve two audiences: humans and machines. Product data must be structured, consistent, and enriched, so AI agents can confidently represent it to shoppers.
The Catalog Optimization Agent in SAP Commerce Cloud helps transform how merchants manage product data at scale. It can clean catalogs, enrich attributes, standardize details, fill gaps, and support multilingual content using real-time data. The agent can scale to catalogs with more than 10 million items, helping teams improve content 70% faster, increase data completeness by 5%, and reduce maintenance effort by 63%.
With AI-ready product data as its foundation, retailers can better match shopper intent, optimize merchandising by channel, and improve pricing and delivery decisions with precision.
Payments must evolve for autonomous commerce
As buying journeys fragment across devices, channels, and agents, payments must become more flexible and nearly invisible. Consumers expect to pay how and when they choose, including through agent-initiated transactions.
New payment rails like FedNow, RTP, and stablecoins are enabling faster, lower-cost transactions, while wallets and bank-based payments continue to converge. Networks such as Visa and Mastercard are already preparing for autonomous commerce by allowing consumers to set spending limits and controls for AI agents.
For retailers, the priority is delivering frictionless, secure payment experiences that integrate seamlessly into agent workflows.
The open payment framework for SAP Commerce Cloud can enable this flexibility through a no-code, low-code approach. Its headless, extensible architecture helps support diverse payment methods, ensure compliance through automatic updates, and integrate natively with SAP Commerce Cloud—working to give retailers agility without sacrificing control or scalability.
Returns become a strategic intelligence engine
Returns are one of retail’s biggest challenges. According to IHL Group, global returns have surpassed US$1.9 trillion and are growing faster than sales. What was once a cost center is now a strategic differentiator.
The next phase of returns management is defined by intelligence. AI enables “keep, reject, or return” decisioning based on loyalty history, behavioral signals, margin impact, and lifetime value. Returns data becomes a feedback loop that improves forecasting, product quality, and merchandising decisions.
Complete, connected data is essential. SAP can deliver this through native integration between SAP ERP and SAP Commerce Cloud, creating a single source of truth across inventory, costs, and transactions. Enterprise Strategy Group found that organizations using both platforms achieved up to 80% lower TCO, up to 90% productivity gains, and 105%–245% revenue uplift from hyper-personalized experiences.
SAP Order Management Services can extend this foundation across the full returns journey, helping to orchestrate centralized rules, guided returns, real-time inventory visibility, and faster refunds—turning returns into a loyalty-building growth lever rather than a revenue drain.
Commerce is detaching from the storefront
As predicted at the end of 2025, AI agents are taking on more shopping tasks, pushing commerce beyond traditional storefronts. A shopper may simply state an intent and let an agent handle research, selection, and checkout.
Discoverability now depends on structured, trustworthy signals—reviews, ratings, social proof, and consistent data that agents rely on to evaluate quality and brand credibility.
Retailers must move beyond transactional efficiency to deliver connected, personalized experiences across every touchpoint. Loyalty programs must reward engagement, not just purchases. Inventory visibility, accurate delivery promises, and proactive issue resolution become table stakes.
SAP Customer Loyalty Management can enable retailers to design adaptive loyalty strategies for this new environment, personalizing rewards and offers based on real-time behavior—whether purchases happen through traditional channels or AI agents. These insights can then feed transactional agents, helping to improve relevance and outcomes across the journey.
Operational reliability remains critical. SAP Order Management Services help unify order, inventory, fulfillment, and POS data, while agentic innovations like the Order Reliability Agent can proactively resolve fulfillment issues before they impact customers.
Trust is the core retail responsibility
As agentic systems influence more of commerce, trust becomes the most valuable asset retailers can protect. Consumers must trust that their data, preferences, and payments are secure and governed responsibly.
Retailers and commerce providers increasingly act as AI trust custodians, balancing intelligence with deterministic constraints and governance. On-site AI can scale associate expertise and personalization while preserving brand integrity and customer confidence.
Commerce is becoming an ecosystem of intelligent interactions—where discovery, payments, fulfillment, and returns are connected by agents acting on behalf of shoppers and businesses alike.
The winners will be those who align product intelligence, flexible payments, data-driven returns, and trust across every touchpoint. Agentic AI can make commerce more personal, efficient, and scalable—but only for those who build the right foundations today.
To learn more about how SAP Commerce Cloud is powering AI-driven commerce, visit sap.com/commerce.
Kollen Glynn is global head of SAP Commerce Cloud for SAP Customer Experience.
