ZAWYA: Publicis Sapient launch landmark Agentic Commerce Report in collaboration with Salesforce

• Joint whitepaper projects up to $5 trillion in AI agent-orchestrated global commerce revenue by 2030, outlining a practical roadmap for businesses navigating the shift from human-driven to AI-mediated shopping

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM, and Publicis Sapient, a global digital business transformation company providing enterprise AI platforms and services, today released "Agentic Commerce: Unlocking the Emerging Shopping Experience," a comprehensive technology strategy and transformation guide designed to help business and technology leaders across EMEA and beyond prepare the next major evolution in retail and commerce.

The report projects that AI agent-orchestrated commerce could generate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global revenue by 2030, with the US B2C retail market alone accounting for up to $1 trillion of that figure. For EMEA businesses, the implications are immediate. Consumer behaviour is already shifting at speed. Forty-four percent of users who have tried AI-powered search now prefer it as their primary source, and platform agents such as ChatGPT are processing approximately 350 million shopping-related queries every week. Traffic to retail sites from generative AI browsers and chat services surged 4,700 percent year-over-year in July 2025, signalling that the agent-mediated commerce era is not approaching but already underway.

"Agentic commerce is compressing a transformation that would historically have taken a decade into a window of two to three years," said Mohammed AlKhothani, Area Vice President, Salesforce Middle East. "Businesses across the region that establish agent-addressable capabilities now will compound a durable advantage in data, attribution, and integration that will be exponentially harder to replicate once the market consolidates. That window is open today. It will not remain open indefinitely."

“Agentic Commerce represents a structural shift in how demand will be created, captured and converted,” said Jason English SVP, Publicis Sapient. “Over the next few years, brands will need to optimise not only for human customers, but increasingly for AI agents acting on their behalf. That requires a new approach to commerce architecture, customer data and experience orchestration.”

Unlike the internet's two-decade rollout or mobile's eight-year adoption curve, agentic commerce is moving faster because AI agents do not require new consumer devices. They operate directly across the digital infrastructure, from APIs and payment systems to fulfilment networks, that commerce leaders have already built. This makes the stakes of inaction significantly higher for organisations that have not yet begun their agent-readiness journey.

To help organisations respond, the whitepaper introduces the A.C.E. Framework, a practical architectural model for building agent-ready commerce ecosystems across three critical layers:

• Agentic Experience Interface — enabling products and services to be discoverable and actionable by AI agents
• Composable Micro-Apps — exposing core commerce capabilities through modular, interoperable services
• Enterprise Context Orchestration — governing data, security, compliance and contextual intelligence across the agent ecosystem

The report also identifies three emerging categories of AI agents that organisations must increasingly optimise for: platform agents such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini; brand-owned agents operating within enterprise ecosystems; and personal consumer agents acting on behalf of individual shoppers.

Despite the scale of the opportunity, the report issues a clear warning to leaders who treat AI adoption as a tick-box exercise. Research from MIT NANDA reveals that 95 percent of generative AI initiatives fail to deliver measurable business impact, with workflow misfit, lack of memory architecture, and inadequate service-level objectives among the leading causes of failure. The whitepaper provides a phased implementation blueprint designed to help organisations move from pilot to production within 90 days, significantly compressing the nine-month-plus average seen across the market.

The report further highlights that the Universal Commerce Protocol, launched in January 2026 with backing from Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Walmart, and Salesforce, has established the open standard for AI agent commerce transactions. Organisations that integrate now will be positioned as trusted sources within agent knowledge bases before market consolidation determines which brands are recommended and which are overlooked.

For organisations across EMEA, the report positions agentic commerce not simply as a technology trend, but as a strategic shift that will redefine customer engagement, commerce operations and digital growth over the coming years.

To read the full report, visit:  Agentic Commerce Report 2026

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