Retail is standing at the edge of a massive transformation. The arrival of agentic commerce — autonomous, goal-oriented digital agents capable of discovering products, comparing offers, and completing purchases — promises both extraordinary opportunity and unprecedented risk.

These new agents can drive fraud, scraping, and data loss, but they can also generate growth, conversions, and revenue. To succeed, online retailers must be ready for both. Your website needs to accommodate AI agents for product discovery, and those agents must be able to complete purchases securely.

In this new landscape, control is everything. Businesses that can identify, authenticate, and manage AI agents will grow confidently in the age of agentic commerce. Those that can’t will lose visibility into their traffic, accuracy in their analytics, and trust in their transactions. 

The agentic commerce wave is already here

When Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, announced support for OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, CEO Doug McMillon declared, “For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change.”

Investors took notice. Walmart’s stock jumped 4% on the news — a $32 billion surge in market value.

And on the same day, Salesforce revealed its collaboration with Stripe and OpenAI to build an Instant Checkout integration guided by the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). According to Salesforce research, 48% of shoppers who already use AI for shopping are open to having an AI agent make a purchase on their behalf.

The world’s largest commerce platforms are already adapting. The question now facing every retailer is: can you do the same, safely and fast enough?

Retail’s paradox: High stakes, low readiness

Our 2025 Global Bot Security Report revealed a worrying truth: the vast majority of online retail businesses are unable to detect even the simplest automated bots. Although the level of bot preparedness in retail was better than in many other sectors, only 3.2% of retail domains were fully protected, meaning they successfully blocked all our test bot. 

This leaves the sector poorly equipped for what comes next. If retailers can’t recognize today’s basic bots, they’ll have no visibility at all into tomorrow’s autonomous agents — or the data, decisions, and dollars flowing through them. The result will be lost control of analytics, compromised pricing intelligence, and distorted demand signals.

Other sectors that rely on real-time digital transactions — such as ticketing & entertainment, marketplaces & classifieds, and travel & hospitality — are also at the frontline of agentic commerce. 

In our 2025 report, these industries showed the same pattern as retail: full resilience remains rare, and most websites can still be compromised by basic automation. For marketplaces, that means price scraping and fake listings; for ticketing, it’s automated scalping and inventory denial; for travel, it’s bots manipulating availability and fare comparisons.

From bot defense to foundational infrastructure

Agentic commerce will reward speed, trust, and precision. The winners of the next wave of digital retail will be those who combine AI readiness with AI resilience:

• understanding and engaging with autonomous agents as new forms of traffic and customers
• but also protecting your data, listings, and revenue from the same technologies when they’re misused.

This makes bot & agent trust management foundational infrastructure, not just a security tool. Businesses that can distinguish between a customer, a crawler, and a commerce-enabled AI agent — and treat each appropriately — will control their data, protect their users, and unlock new sources of growth.

What’s next?

The future of online growth will belong to businesses that can recognize and manage every type of visitor — human or AI. As agentic commerce reshapes the digital economy, DataDome helps you turn automation into advantage: enabling visibility, control, and trust with AI agents across your websites, apps, APIs, and MCP servers.

Schedule a demo to see how full visibility and intelligent control can power confident growth in the age of agentic AI.