AI agents have already started buying on behalf of customers. Yet most merchants still lack the infrastructure to serve them. That disconnect sits at the center of PayPal’s first U.S. Agentic Commerce Pulse Survey, based on responses from 498 decision-makers across small businesses, mid-market firms, and large enterprises.
Nearly 95% of merchants report that they can already track or observe traffic originating from AI agents, including web crawling from systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. But only about one in five have structured their product catalogs in machine-readable formats that those same agents can actually interpret and act on in real time. Many also lack the foundational infrastructure required to participate fully in agentic commerce, including interoperable APIs and agent-compatible checkout systems. The result is a market where demand is evolving faster than the systems built to support it.
“We’re seeing the interface layer move first,” Mike Edmonds, PayPal’s VP of agentic commerce and commercial growth, tells Fast Company, noting that where brands once competed for visibility through Google Ads and SEO, agentic commerce is shifting that pressure toward structured product catalogs and how goods appear across LLMs and digital marketplaces.
As search becomes more “intent-driven rather than keyword-driven,” Edmonds says, consumers are moving away from basic queries like “running shoes” and instead asking AI systems for highly specific recommendations tailored to their needs.
According to the study, that shift is happening faster than most merchants anticipated. Across segments, 86% to 94% of businesses expect agentic commerce to have a positive impact over the next 12 to 24 months. Many report that it already has.
“LLMs don’t inherently privilege the largest catalog; they privilege the most structured, most trustworthy data signal,” says PayPal CTO Srini Venkatesan, emphasizing that smaller merchants with strong machine-readable data and credible signals can, in theory, compete alongside much larger players in agent-driven discovery.
But while the technology could level the playing field, Venkatesan notes that many small businesses still lack the resources or operational flexibility to navigate complex integrations, making broader ecosystem support essential.
