Your customers are already beginning their shopping journeys through AI. Whether they are asking ChatGPT to find the best hiking boots or telling Gemini to book a hotel for a weekend trip, agentic commerce is happening right now, in real conversations, with real purchase intent behind them. Nearly half (44%) of AI users say that AI has become their primary and preferred source for internet searching.
According to Adobe's holiday 2025 data, AI referral traffic to retail sites climbed nearly 700% year over year, and it is converting higher and spending more per visit than traditional channels. And while only a fraction of ecommerce today is attributed to agentic commerce, Accenture expects that 30% of all online commerce will run through agents by 2030.
Today, most shoppers are not completing purchases within third-party chatbots just yet. They are finding products using AI and clicking links that lead them to retail websites to complete the purchase.
The reasons? Identity and authorization. Two questions sit underneath every agentic transaction, and most retail systems cannot answer either one reliably:
- Identity: Is a real, authorized human actually behind the AI's action? Do they have a loyalty account with us?
- Authorization: Does that human have permission to spend this money?
If your products and services cannot be securely purchased by third-party AI agents, your brand may become an inconvenience to a rapidly growing segment of consumers using AI to shop.
What Are The Four Phases of Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is unfolding in four distinct phases:
Phase 1: Product Discovery. Already mainstream. LLMs research products, compare options, and hand shoppers a shortlist. If your catalog is not structured for AI visibility, you are already invisible to a growing share of buyers.
Phase 2: Checkout Functions. This is where the market is actively emerging today. Purchases now happen inside the chat interface itself, using stored payment and shipping details. OpenAI, Google, Stripe, and Shopify have all released standards — including UCP, ACP, and AP2 — to support these agent-to-agent payments.
Phase 3: Delegate-to-Buy. Early experimentation is underway. Shoppers hand agents actual purchasing authority: research the options, make the call, complete the purchase. This demands more than a payment method — it requires full trust infrastructure covering identity verification and fraud prevention.
Phase 4: Agent-to-Agent Commerce. The future horizon. Buyer agents negotiate directly with merchant agents — not just to purchase, but to haggle, asking a retailer's agent to beat a competitor's price.
Auth0’s Approach: Identity as the Foundation
Auth0’s solution for agentic commerce is already in production today with: User Authentication, Async Authorization, and Auth for MCP. Auth0 helps enable you to secure MCP servers, identify and register agents using CIMD, and verify shopper identity through OAuth. This way your business can move fast to capture this massive AI opportunity, without having to wait on a new product cycle. And if you already have an IdP, you do not need to replace it. You can add Auth0’s agent layer on top of what you already run so you can unlock a new sales channel today and grow into the north star.
Two use cases define how retailers and hospitality organizations are putting this to work.
Use case 1: Third-party shopping agents
Your customer is already inside ChatGPT or Gemini, asking it to find products or book a stay. This use case lets that agent complete the purchase at your store on the customer's behalf, without ever leaving the chat interface.
Retailers build an MCP server secured with the help of Auth0, which can allow the brand to have a presence inside major AI ecosystems like ChatGPT or Gemini. Shoppers search the catalog, bookmark items, and complete checkout, all inside the conversation.
The security architecture runs on a few core mechanisms:
Agent registration, using CIMD (Cross-App Identity Metadata Discovery) and an "Agent as Principal" model, lets merchants decide exactly which platforms get access, like ChatGPT, Gemini, or any verified AI agent meeting their trust bar.
On-behalf-of token exchange means the agent never holds a master key. Once a shopper approves a cart, the agent receives a temporary, scoped pass tied to that specific transaction, and it expires fast.
Because the agent operates on a known, logged-in user's behalf, it only ever sees that shopper's own data, never a broader slice of the retailer's customer base.
Use case 2: Internal, owned shopping agents
Some retailers do not want to depend entirely on third-party AI ecosystems. This use case covers building a proprietary shopping agent that lives inside the retailer's own website or app, trained on the brand's own product data and inventory.
A shopper lands on the site, tells the agent what they want, and the agent recommends and purchases on their behalf directly within the retailer's own environment.
Auth0 helps secure that internal agent and ties every action it takes back to a real, approved shopper. The same on-behalf-of token exchange model applies. The agent gets scoped access tied to an authenticated session, not a standing credential that persists beyond the task. This gives digital leaders full control over the experience and the data, without sacrificing the identity guarantees that keep the channel auditable.
This use case matters most for retailers who want the commerce agent to be a proprietary asset and part of the brand experience, not just a listing inside someone else's chat window.
Where the Market Is Heading
Emerging protocols like Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) point to where the market is going, and Auth0 is currently working toward integrating identity within these protocols.
As open protocols mature, retailers need infrastructure that adapts without a rebuild every time a new standard emerges. That includes:
Securing UCP servers, positioning retailers for broader cross-platform agent commerce as UCP adoption grows.
Supporting Agentic Payments Protocols (AP2) for fully autonomous purchasing — the kind of transaction where an agent buys a laptop the moment its price drops below a threshold the shopper set in advance, with no additional human click required.
Streamlined Identity Linking where a shopper is signed into a retail site with a Google account and later opens Gemini using that same account, the agent can browse and purchase seamlessly, without a fresh, friction-heavy consent screen at every step.
There is also a future where agent-to-agent negotiations emerge, agents asking a retailer's agent to match or beat a competitor's price, and where every microtransaction in that exchange needs its own layer of verifiable trust.
What This Means for Your Team
For the developer building the agent: the hard identity work — login, temporary-pass issuance, human-approval steps, and record-keeping — is already built. Doing this in-house means months of identity plumbing before a single transaction ships, time a launch deadline usually does not have. Auth0’s approach drops in alongside the login and security tools you already run.
For the IT, security, or compliance leader: the audit trail is not an afterthought bolted on later. Every purchase ties back to a real, approved person and the exact permission they gave. If a charge gets disputed or an agent misbehaves, the human owner and the specific policy violated are provable without digging across multiple systems.
For the digital or e-commerce leader: this is a new source of revenue and market share. AI referral traffic already converts higher and spends more per visit than traditional channels. The identity layer is not a cost center slowing the channel down — it is the mechanism that lets the channel open safely in the first place.
Open Your Agentic Commerce Storefront with Auth0
Agentic commerce is a channel your customers are already using, whether or not your storefront is ready to meet them there. Retailers that solve the identity problem first stand to capture a sales channel before competitors finish debating whether the trend is real. Retailers that wait risk becoming invisible to a growing share of shoppers who never open a browser tab at all.
Third-party shopping agents, internally owned shopping agents, and standards-based protocols like UCP and ACP give retailers a path that starts today and scales toward where the market is going. None of it requires ripping out an existing identity provider or checkout stack. All of it requires getting the identity layer right before transaction volume arrives.
Ready to open the channel? Talk to Auth0 about how to begin securing your agentic commerce strategy — whether you are standing up your first MCP server, building a proprietary shopping agent, or preparing for a fully autonomous, agent-to-agent future.
Learn more about how Auth0 is helping secure agentic commerce in our ebook The Identity Layer Behind Agentic Commerce.
These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and are not intended to be legal, privacy, security, compliance, or business advice. You are responsible for obtaining security, privacy, compliance, or business advice from your own professional advisors. Any mention of future products, features, functionalities, or certifications is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment to deliver. © Okta, Inc. and its affiliates, 2026.