“What consumers really want is for commerce to happen immediately,” Scott Hendrickson, chief revenue officer of the agentic AI merchant network firmly, said. Hendrickson and his co-founder Kumar Senthil argue that the evolution from search to suggestion to settlement is the next logical step in eCommerce. It’s agentic AI at its most promising. That subtle shift in search behavior is forcing merchants to rethink where, and how, they meet shoppers. If an AI agent can compress browsing, selection and checkout into the same dialogue, retailers that sit outside the conversation risk ceding both visibility and sales. For Hendrickson, the technical plumbing enables a strategic shift in how merchants think about customer acquisition. “Right now, the search experience is you search for a product and then you immediately leave,” he told. “With the new LLMs you might start your research, refine what you’re looking for, and make the purchase in the same place. You don’t have to leave the site to complete that full funnel anymore, and that’s what’s ultimately going to drive better performance.” Consolidating the funnel could also upend traditional advertising economics. If the agent closes a sale within the first interaction, retailers may decide to shift dollars from pay-per-click campaigns toward deeper catalog and logistics integrations. Conversely, platforms that mediate the sale, such as chatbots, voice assistants or augmented-reality overlays, gain new leverage to capture a slice of the transaction rather than bill for impressions. That model works only if the agent can reliably see a broad, up-to-date range of products. Lifestyle labels in particular worry that ceding the front-end experience to an agentic AI could erode brand storytelling. Hendrickson counters that many customers now encounter products through a third-party channel anyway from an influencer’s livestream, a buy button inside Instagram, or a same-day-delivery marketplace. “We’re not eliminating brand,” he said. “We’re shortening the distance between intent and conversion.”