Most AI solutions in e-commerce today are still rule-based chatbots. The next step — intelligent assistants powered by RAG and function calling, capable of working with product catalogs and guiding buyers through purchases in a conversation — is gaining traction but remains far from mainstream adoption. And on the horizon, a third model is already taking shape: fully agentic commerce, where a buyer's AI agent independently discovers, compares, and purchases products without ever visiting a store's website.
The infrastructure for this is already being built. First came universal protocols — MCP for agent-to-service interaction and A2A for agent-to-agent communication. Then, specialized commercial protocols emerged on top of them: Google's UCP and OpenAI's ACP. In this talk, we'll explore where the industry currently stands on this evolutionary ladder, how the approaches of key players differ, which early experiments have already failed — and what sellers and developers should be doing today to prepare for a world where the storefront is a context window.