ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS AN AUTONOMOUS SUBJECT OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE: A THEORETICAL CONCEPTUALISATION OF AGENTIC COMMERCE
Abstract
The article provides a theoretical reflection on a new stage in the evolution of electronic commerce linked to the emergence of autonomous artificial intelligence agents capable of making purchasing decisions on behalf of individuals or organisations. The relevance of the topic stems from the rapid expansion of agentic commerce: forecasts indicate that by 2030 autonomous agents may control up to thirty trillion US dollars in transactions, while in 2025 leading technology platforms launched open protocols of interaction between agents and merchants, which signals a transition of the phenomenon from an experimental stage to one of institutional consolidation. Despite the active discussion of agentic commerce in industry reports and technical publications, its scholarly conceptualisation remains fragmented; existing studies treat artificial intelligence in electronic commerce predominantly in an instrumental perspective, while its capacity to act as an autonomous subject of economic interaction has not received a systematic theoretical framing. The aim of the article is to provide a conceptualisation of agentic commerce and a theoretical reflection on its significance for electronic commerce and marketing. The methodology combines a narrative literature review with conceptual analysis and theoretical synthesis based on academic publications of 2022–2026 indexed in international and Ukrainian scholarly databases. The results clarify the genesis of the concept of agentic commerce, distinguish three closely related but non-identical categories - digital assistant, artificial intelligence agent and autonomous agent - and propose a three-phase model of the evolution of the purchasing subject from the bound consumer through the adaptable consumer to the autonomous consumer. The technological prerequisites of the phenomenon are outlined, including large language models, multi-agent systems and open infrastructural protocols. It is shown that the delegation of purchasing decisions to autonomous agents transforms classical models of consumer behaviour, challenges the notions of loyalty, engagement, conversion and emotional branding, and reorients marketing communication from human attention towards machine-readable signals of trust.
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