Accenture Song’s Rajat Agarwal: Agentic Commerce Promises ‘The Biggest Transformation’ In Two Decades

CANNES, France — Digital commerce has long been accepted but never truly loved, with 85% of consumers abandoning transactions after product selection due to friction-filled checkout experiences — a persistent failure that agentic commerce is uniquely positioned to address.

“If we look at the current system of digital commerce, it’s an accepted system. It’s not really loved,” Rajat Agarwal, senior managing director and global commerce practice lead at Accenture Song, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Cannes Lions. “Almost 85% of consumers actually abandon their transactions after they have made the selection because there are so many friction points in the entire cycle. The promise of agentic commerce is to really address many of these friction points.”

Simulation research across 50,000 synthetic consumers conducted with Accenture company Arwen found agentic commerce potential across all five major consumer mission types — from repeatable grocery purchases to complex travel decisions and B2B negotiations.

Two types of agents will emerge

Horizontal platforms including ChatGPT, Amazon, and Alexa will dominate search, browse, and checkout optimization while vertical agents built by brands and retailers provide deep category expertise and authentic brand experiences that generalist platforms cannot replicate.

“For a lot of our clients, which are brands and which are retailers, I think they have a real possibility of trying to provide authentic human experience, authentic brand experience, because they understand their category much better than anybody else,” Agarwal said.

This distinction creates a fundamental strategic choice for brands between becoming the choice of agent — showing up within dominant platforms — or becoming the agent of choice by building proprietary vertical commerce experiences.

Brands must learn to market to agents

Agents intermediating brand-consumer relationships require factual, confirmable product information rather than emotional messaging, as AI intermediaries evaluate claims through social sources and third-party references before making recommendations.

“There’s an agent in between the brands and the humans and the agents are not emotional. So you have to be much more factual. You have to ensure that whatever you are saying can be confirmed by agent through social sources, through other third party references,” Agarwal said.

This requirement demands significant investment in content systems and product information infrastructure to ensure agents accurately represent brand positioning to consumers.

Shopping should be inspirational, not just efficient

Agentic commerce’s true promise extends beyond transaction friction reduction toward replicating the best possible human retail experience — knowledgeable, unobtrusive guidance that creates genuine shopping delight.

“Agentic commerce is meeting the best salesperson you would ever encounter in a shop who would know exactly what you are looking for, is not very intrusive and really guides you to the exact purchase,” Agarwal said. “Shopping should not be boring and it should not just be making it more efficient. In a lot of cases we want it to be inspirational.”

Brands that treat agentic commerce as simply another channel miss its deeper potential for authentic, human-first consumer experiences that transform how people discover and purchase products.

“Brands should not feel that agentic commerce is just another channel. It’s the ability to provide a truly authentic, human first experience to their customers,” Agarwal said.

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