B2B Agentic Commerce: From Incremental to Exponential

Agentic commerce is a form of autonomous buying where artificial intelligence (AI) agents make purchases on behalf of shoppers. This retail model is gaining steam in retail and e-commerce companies, as my colleague Pete Olanday – Vertex’s Director, Retail Consulting – has reported. Last fall, McKinsey research projected that the U.S. retail market could generate up to $1 trillion from agentic commerce by 2030, with the global retail market reaching $3 trillion to $5 trillion.

“Agentic AI systems and tools will enable the emergence of increasingly autonomous supply chains,” Pete notes. “These systems can independently forecast demand, reroute shipments mid-transit, and rebalance inventory across hundreds of locations.” As the supply chain’s AI-enablement advances, it becomes more important for companies to establish a centralized data foundation that supports a connected, real time view of supply chain, financial, and tax data.

An Autonomous Tipping Point

Procurement groups also need access to that data foundation as they move ahead with agentic commerce capabilities. So far, that progress has been modest, but once B2B agentic commerce initiatives cross a certain threshold, they are likely to shift into high gear and accelerate from there. This is the case because it takes time to get building blocks like policy-driven guardrails, trust in autonomous purchasing, and supplier readiness in place: “In B2B, delegation is institutional,” according to a recent McKinsey report on agentic commerce adoption. “Authority flows from procurement policies, budget owners, risk teams, and legal frameworks. As a result, autonomy advances more slowly. But once unlocked, it scales far more powerfully.”

Early work on agentic commerce involves agents helping procurement teams analyze technical purchasing requirements, contractual terms, service levels, pricing, and historical performance to streamline approval. The McKinsey report indicates that an inflection point arrives once agents are given the green light to purchase within specified guardrails – based on preferred vendor tiers, compliance requirements, and spending limits – and with human supervision. At that point autonomous buying can advance as quickly as supplier readiness allows.

Closing the Readiness Gap

It takes two to tango, and buyers and suppliers are not quite in step right now. Recent Deloitte survey research reveals that nearly three-quarters of B2B suppliers rate their sales processes as mostly or highly automated; however, less than half of B2B buyers share that opinion. Deloitte identifies two common barriers to B2B agentic commerce adoption: securing funding for technology investments and technology integration. In many cases, suppliers who quantify revenue risks associated with customer dissatisfaction can clear the technology-funding hurdle.

Insufficient systems integration is a pervasive problem: only 13% of surveyed B2B suppliers reported that their front-office systems (sales/e-commerce) are completely integrated with back-office systems, which include ERP systems, procurement platforms, and tax technology stacks. Deloitte encourages suppliers to include front-office integration in their ERP upgrades.

That approach would help get B2B buyers and sellers to the agentic commerce inflection point faster. Before that threshold is crossed, tax, finance, and IT groups should make sure that tax technology can keep pace and answer new questions regarding how tax determination is affected when inventory is autonomously redirected across state lines. As Pete asserts, “The speed of autonomous supply chain, logistics, and inventory decisions may outpace human-managed workflows, elevating the need for advanced tax automation.”