The Rise of Agentic Commerce: How AI Shopping Agents Will Reshape Retail & SME Growth

Hi, I’m Aby

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Our HERO image this week depicts Alcatraz —a metropolitan landscape rising with depth and momentum — depicts the new era where SMEs must climb the Automation Curve to build strong, growing Flight 78910™ businesses.

The New Retail Battlefield: McKinsey’s Agentic AI Rules Every SME Must Follow to Stay Competitive

Introduction

This week, we begin a new series: SME & Agentic AI Commercial Success — a deep dive into how Agentic AI is reshaping not just productivity, but the commercial outcomes that matter most to SME owners: ROI, revenue growth, profitability, and sustainable competitive advantage.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), in its Small Business Trends 2026 report, highlights the rise of AI automation as a defining shift for SMEs. The report notes a move away from simple experimentation toward the adoption of Agentic AI — systems capable of performing tasks autonomously rather than merely assisting a human.

In 2025, most SMEs used generative AI (like ChatGPT) for basic tasks: drafting emails, creating content, or simple workflow support. But in 2026, the shift accelerates toward Agentic AI, where AI agents can independently execute tasks, make decisions, and manage processes end‑to‑end. This marks a transition from AI as a tool to AI as an autonomous operator.

In 2025, most SMEs used generative AI (like ChatGPT) for basic tasks: drafting emails, creating content, or simple workflow support. But in 2026, the shift accelerates toward Agentic AI, where AI agents can independently execute tasks, make decisions, and manage processes end‑to‑end. This marks a transition from AI as a tool to AI as an autonomous operator.

While this shift has delivered operational productivity gains for SMEs and large enterprises — especially through AI prompts, workflow automation, and process optimisation — there is still a major commercial gap. Most SMEs have not yet translated AI adoption into measurable improvements in:

• ROI
• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Commercial performance metrics

Productivity alone is not enough. To build a strong, growing, profitable 7‑8‑9‑10‑figure business with sustainable competitive advantage, SMEs must move beyond operational efficiency and into Agentic commercial strategy.

That is the purpose of this series: To equip SME owners with the insights, frameworks, and strategic tools needed to spot trends, execute bold strategies, and drive exponential business outcomes using Agentic AI.

Over the coming weeks, we will explore the must‑have insights, frameworks, tools, and success factors shaping Agentic AI across industries — from transformation and disruption to pricing, consumer behaviour, and case studies of businesses implementing Agentic AI successfully.

This week, we begin with The Automation Curve Agentic Commerce, drawing on McKinsey’s analysis of how AI shopping agents are already reshaping retail. McKinsey maps each stage of consumer delegation to an AI agent, offering a strategic framework that any SME can use to understand how both consumers and businesses will increasingly delegate tasks to autonomous AI systems.

Rather than a sudden leap to full autonomy, McKinsey frames Agentic Commerce as a gradual progression along a delegation spectrum — where humans hand over more control to AI agents based on task type, trust, and complexity.

This progression is the foundation for understanding how Agentic AI will transform not only operations, but commercial performance.

Agentic Commerce Explained: What McKinsey’s AI Shopping Agents Mean for SMEs in 2026

The Blueprint is a deeper dive into the what, why, and how of implementing the Automation Curve — also known as the Spectrum of Delegation — inside an SME business. McKinsey categorises this evolution into clear levels of maturity, showing how tasks progress from human‑led to fully autonomous Agentic AI execution.

Understanding this spectrum allows any SME owner or entrepreneur to identify where their product, service, or internal processes currently sit on the delegation curve — and more importantly, what strategic steps are required to move upward.

This Blueprint gives SME businesses a structured way to:

• Map their current position on the Spectrum of Delegation
• Identify the right resources needed to advance
• Define the metrics required to monitor performance
• Forecast the commercial impact of Agentic AI adoption

 

Below is the framework for mapping an Agentic task or process inside any SME. The key question for every business is:

Where are we on the Spectrum of Delegation — and how can we improve the strategic metrics that drive the business forward?

This Blueprint is designed to help SMEs move from basic automation to Agentic commercial performance, building the foundation for stronger ROI, higher revenue, and long‑term competitive advantage.

THE AUTOMATION CURVE: THE SPECTRUM OF DELEGATION —

McKinsey categorises the rise of Agentic AI into a six‑stage maturity model known as the Spectrum of Delegation. This framework maps how tasks evolve from simple rule‑based automation to fully autonomous, agent‑to‑agent decision‑making.

Understanding where your SME sits on this spectrum is essential for identifying opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce operational load, and unlock new commercial value.

Below is the full breakdown of the Spectrum of Delegation:

1. Programmed Convenience (Rule‑Based)

The simplest level of automation. The system executes a pre‑defined human preference — such as scheduled refills, auto‑ship subscriptions, or recurring orders. There is no decision‑making, only rule execution.

2. Assist (Research)

The AI acts as a search, filtering, and comparison engine. It helps the user:

• Discover options
• Compare prices
• Summarise reviews
• Narrow choices

The human still makes the final decision.

3. Assemble (Cart Management)

The AI coordinates multi‑step tasks across multiple sources. Examples include:

• Building a grocery list
• Adding items from different stores
• Preparing a full set of supplies for a specific goal

The AI is now managing workflow, not just information.

4. Authorize (Decision Execution)

The AI identifies a need, proposes a transaction, and executes it within pre‑defined guardrails. For example:

• Buy if under £50
• Reorder when stock drops below 20%

The human may still give a final OK, but the AI is now initiating decisions.

5. Autonomise (Predictive / Mandated)

The AI acts independently, using contextual signals to make decisions without human involvement. Examples:

• Detecting low supply
• Predicting upcoming needs
• Automatically placing orders

This is true Agentic AI — autonomous, context‑aware, and self‑directed.

6. Networked Autonomy (Agent‑to‑Agent)

The most advanced stage. A consumer’s AI agent negotiates directly with a merchant’s AI agent to:

• Finalise terms
• Agree pricing
• Confirm fulfilment
• Optimise delivery

This is AI‑to‑AI commerce, where humans set strategy but agents execute operations.

CORE DRIVERS OF THE AUTOMATION CURVE

McKinsey’s analysis makes one point clear: movement along the Automation Curve is not driven by how tech‑savvy a consumer is. Instead, it is driven by the nature of the purchase itself — specifically how predictable, risky, or trust‑dependent the decision is.

Consumers move further up the Spectrum of Delegation when three core conditions are met:

1. The Decision Is Solved (Repetitive, Low‑Regret Purchases)

For routine, repetitive purchases  household staples, consumables, predictable replenishment items ; consumers prioritise efficiency over discovery. These are solved decisions, where the buyer already knows what they want and simply wants it handled automatically.

2. Trust Is Managed (High‑Value or High‑Regret Items Stay Lower on the Curve)

For high‑value, high‑regret, or emotionally weighted purchases, consumers require more human oversight. McKinsey refers to this as the need for circuit breakers ; moments where the human must confirm, approve, or override the AI’s recommendation.

3. Risk Is Mitigated (Guardrails and Constraints)

Consumers delegate more when the system operates within clear guardrails, such as:

• Defined budgets
• Preferred merchants
• Approved product categories
• Spending limits
• Delivery constraints

These guardrails ensure the AI cannot exceed boundaries, reducing perceived risk and increasing willingness to delegate.

Together, these drivers determine how far and how fast consumers (and businesses) move up the Automation Curve from simple rule‑based tasks to fully autonomous, agent‑to‑agent commerce.

The Automation Curve: McKinsey’s Agentic AI Blueprint for SME Competitiveness in 2026

The Automation Curve highlights several strategic priorities SME business owners and entrepreneurs must prepare for if they want to remain competitive, capture market share, and grow margins, profit, revenue, and ROI in the coming Agentic AI era.

Research shows that 10–15% of all businesses in Western economies are retail, with even higher percentages in developing nations. Additionally, a significant number of new founders globally launch DTC (Direct‑to‑Consumer) retail brands as their entry point into entrepreneurship — testing market fit, validating demand, and capturing early customer share.

This makes understanding Agentic Commerce essential. Studying how AI is reshaping retail provides SME owners with early signals of emerging trends, competitive shifts, and new opportunities to differentiate in their industries.

McKinsey argues that if a business wants to participate in this future, it must shift from optimising for humans (SEO, visual branding, UX) to optimising for machines — ensuring AI agents can read, interpret, and act on business data.

To succeed in an Agentic AI marketplace, SMEs must prioritise three strategic capabilities:

1. Machine‑Readable Data

Your website — your digital “shop window” — must be easily parsed by AI agents. This requires:

• Structured product data
• Clean pricing information
• Clear availability signals
• Transparent return policies
• Standardised warranty information

If AI agents cannot read your data, they cannot recommend or transact with your business.

2. Agent‑Ready Infrastructure

Businesses must expose APIs that allow external AI agents to:

• Check inventory
• Validate availability
• Compare SKUs
• Execute transactions directly

This becomes as critical as having a human‑facing checkout page. In the Agentic era, AI agents are a new customer segment — and they require infrastructure built for them.

3. Trust Layers

AI agents must be able to prove identity and authenticate spending authority. This requires:

• Digital identity protocols
• Secure payment authorisation
• Verified agent credentials
• Fraud‑resistant transaction flows

Without trust layers, AI agents cannot transact autonomously on behalf of users.

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Strategic Takeaway

By synthesising the FSB’s 2026 Small Business AI findings with McKinsey’s Agentic Commerce framework, we can clearly define how SMEs must stop viewing AI as a cost or gadget — and start using it as a structural competitive advantage.

Implementing the McKinsey Automation Curve (discussed earlier in this newsletter) gives SMEs a practical roadmap for transforming AI from a set of tools into a commercial engine that drives ROI, revenue, profitability, and long‑term competitive strength.

Below are the core strategic actions.

 1. Stop Experimenting — Start Orchestrating

Most SMEs still treat AI as a collection of disconnected tools: a chatbot here, a writing assistant there, a workflow hack somewhere else.

This fragmented approach produces fragmented results.

The shift now is to treat AI as an Operating System ; a coordinated architecture where tools talk to each other and trigger end‑to‑end workflows.

Examples include:

• A lead inquiry triggers an automated qualification workflow
• Qualified leads trigger calendar booking
• Bookings trigger CRM updates
• CRM updates trigger pipeline forecasting

This is the difference between using AIL and running an AI‑systematic business.

Follow‑up: AI operating system for SMEs

 2. Optimise for Machine‑Readable Commerce

In the Agentic era, your digital presence must be optimised not only for humans — but for AI agents.

If an AI agent acting on behalf of a customer cannot parse your business data, your business effectively does not exist in the new commerce landscape.

Action: Ensure your product descriptions, pricing, availability, and policies are:

• Structured
• Clean
• API‑ready
• Machine‑readable
• Updated in real time

This is how your business becomes selectable in an AI‑driven marketplace.

Follow‑up: Machine readable commerce

3. Focus on High‑Value Delegation

Do not automate for novelty. Automate for impact.

Use the Automation Curve to audit your business and identify your most expensive manual processes:

• Lead follow‑up
• Invoicing
• Customer qualification
• Routine support
• Inventory updates
• Supplier coordination

Delegate these to AI agents.

This frees your human team to focus on the high‑judgment, high‑emotion, high‑complexity work that AI cannot replicate:

• Brand building
• Strategic decision‑making
• High‑stakes problem solving
• Customer relationships

4. Build a Trust Moat — Your Most Valuable Competitive Advantage

As AI becomes ubiquitous, its output becomes commoditised. Your true competitive advantage becomes Brand Trust.

Customers will choose the SME that delivers:

• AI‑powered speed
• AI‑powered efficiency
• AI‑powered responsiveness combined with
• Human oversight
• Human judgment
• Human reassurance

This creates a premium hybrid experience that fully automated, faceless competitors cannot match.

Strategy: Use AI to accelerate operations, but ensure that:

• Final decisions
• Complex interactions
• Sensitive communications

carry the mark of human review.

This is how SMEs build a trust moat that compounds over time.

Conclusion

As outlined in our earlier Davo newsletter ; Davo AI Reality check; From Experimenting to Generating ROI  the next stage of AI evolution is the shift from generative AI to Agentic AI. This transition is no longer theoretical — it is already reshaping how SMEs operate, compete, and grow. Also read our AI Series

The FSB focuses on the operational health of SMEs, while McKinsey focuses on the commercial mechanics of the digital economy. Yet both reach the same conclusion:

The competitive landscape is shifting from “who has the best human talent” to “who has the best integrated AI systems.”

Below are the three defining shifts shaping SME competitiveness in 2026 and beyond.

 1. The Shift in Utility — From Prompting to Delegated Execution

SMEs are moving away from manual prompting (e.g., “write this email”) toward delegated execution, where AI agents:

• Monitor inventory
• Email suppliers
• Reconcile invoices
• Manage workflows end‑to‑end

However, this shift is still in its infancy. Most SMEs are only achieving fragmented productivity gains, and worse — everyone is using the same tools, trained on the same public data, without proprietary datasets or defensible IP.

This creates a massive opportunity for SMEs willing to build proprietary systems, workflows, or data assets that competitors cannot replicate.

2. The Infrastructure Mandate — Build a Machine‑Readable Business

McKinsey emphasises that AI agents are less forgiving than humans. Messy, siloed, inconsistent data breaks the system.

To compete, SMEs must build a machine‑readable foundation, where:

• Pricing
• Inventory
• Policies
• Fulfilment data

are structured, standardised, and accessible to software — not just human eyes.

 3. The Risk/Reward Paradox — Trust Is the New Differentiator

The FSB highlights a growing trust gap. As AI handles more scheduling, payments, triage, and decision‑making, the margin for error shrinks.

The SMEs that win in 2026 are not those that automate the most, but those that automate the right workflows:

• High‑ROI
• High‑frequency
• High‑friction
• Governed with human oversight

This is where trust compounds into competitive advantage.

New Competitive Advantages for SMEs

Opportunity still abounds for SME owners to carve out defensible advantages — including intellectual property strategies, proprietary datasets, or unique Agentic workflows built around the three shifts above.

Another competitive advantage lies in understanding how value pools are shifting as AI agents mediate commerce. McKinsey frames this shift clearly:

Search, comparison, and consideration collapse into a single agent‑mediated moment. Continuous commerce replaces episodic decisions. Loyalty becomes less about sentiment and more about policy.

As a result:

• Value pools migrate
• Margins depend on fulfilment reliability and policy clarity
• Advantage accrues to merchants who can execute against agent constraints, not just attract human attention
• Discovery‑dependent businesses face the risk of disintermediation

Importantly, McKinsey stresses that the Automation Curve does not prescribe a single end state. Instead, it reveals where delegation creates value — and where human moments must be preserved.

Retailers and SMEs that recognise these contours early can invest accordingly:

• Push toward autonomy where it reduces friction
• Preserve human touchpoints where they matter most

The Battle Has Just Begun

For us, the FLIGHT 78910™ model is about building strong, growing, profitable businesses with sustainable competitive advantage. And for SME business owners and entrepreneurs who share this mindset, the competitive race is only just beginning. Those who think, plan, and execute bold strategies will capture first‑mover advantage — and even second‑mover advantage, which still delivers a significant win by allowing SMEs to leapfrog peers who are slower to adapt, leaving their competitors behind.

SMEs are uniquely positioned to win because Agentic AI introduces a new competitive dynamic:

Machine‑readiness levels the playing field. It is no longer enough to optimise for humans — SEO, visual branding, UX. The next era requires optimising for machines, for AI agents, and for a future where software becomes a primary customer and decision‑maker.

This shift gives SMEs the opportunity to compete — and win — against much larger brands and enterprises. By embracing Agentic Commerce and preparing their businesses to be machine‑readable, agent‑ready, and strategically aligned with the Automation Curve, SMEs can secure a durable advantage in a marketplace being reshaped in real time.

The battle has begun — and SMEs who act boldly, whether as first movers or second movers, will be the ones who rise.

References

1. Agentic commerce: How AI shopping agents can change retail | McKinsey

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Related Posts:

• How SMEs Can Shift From Generative AI to Agentic AI for Faster, Scalable Growth – The2015B Group
• How Agentic AI Transforms SME Growth: From Manual Hustle to Autonomous Scale – The2015B Group
• Agentic AI for SMEs: How SMEs can Strengthen Cash Flow, Reduce Debt, and Build Resilient Growth – The2015B Group
• How SMEs Should Implement AI: The Strategic Mindset Behind a Winning Generative & Agentic AI Strategy – The2015B Group

Until next week—
Set bold strategy. Set big targets. Take massive action. Measure what matters.

About the Author

Aby Rufus
Business Investor Strategy Expert Entrepreneur with an MBA in Strategic Planning—offering billion-dollar strategic solutions for SMEs.