Retail
Digital transformation
Ecommerce
Artifical intelligence
24 February 2026

Agentic Commerce & UCP: What’s Changing Concretely for Retailers in 2026

By

Thavy Khamtan, Vice-president – Unified Commerce and Strategic Alliances at Novatize

NRF 2026: agentic commerce and UCP are redefining the retail industry. Discover the concrete impacts for retailers and the key actions to implement in 2026.

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Thavy Khamtan, Vice-president – Unified Commerce and Strategic Alliances at Novatize

Thavy Khamtan is a recognized professional in Quebec’s technology ecosystem and has contributed to the growth of several companies internationally. Formerly a Unified Commerce Leader at KPMG Canada, he guided mid-sized and large organizations through the transformation of their business models to make them more agile and efficient. He has led large-scale initiatives across sectors including food, retail, and manufacturing. Passionate about sustainable innovation, he also supports Time for the Planet, a collective dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

At Novatize, his role is to drive business development through strategic partnerships. He also works to build an ecosystem that enables companies to develop their own unified commerce model with Novatize—tailored to their challenges and supported by the best solutions on the market.

Agentic Commerce & UCP: What’s Changing Concretely for Retailers in 2026

At the NRF 2026, several announcements confirmed a major shift: artificial intelligence in commerce is moving from demonstration to execution. To identify the trends worth watching and witness the most structuring announcements firsthand, Novatize attended NRFʼ26 in New York—at the heart of the retail ecosystem. The goal was clear: understand what is already being deployed at scale, what is becoming a standard, and what this means in practical terms for retailers and eCommerce teams.

At Novatize, we support retail organizations as they evolve their platforms, data foundations, and digital journeys. In 2026, the challenge is no longer simply to integrate “AI features,” but to prepare for a new way of buying: agentic commerce.

Definition

What is Agentic Commerce?

Agentic commerce refers to a purchasing mode where AI no longer merely assists with search or suggests recommendations. It helps execute an intent within a defined framework. Concretely, an agent can help clarify a need, apply constraints (budget, timelines, preferences), select an option, initiate a transaction, and orchestrate the steps that follow.

This is a structural shift for retail because it moves part of the journey outside traditional interfaces. Transactional websites, category pages, and navigation remain important, but they are not necessarily the central point of decision-making anymore. Commerce becomes more intent-driven and depends on how effectively an offer can be understood and acted on by automated systems.

UCP: Why This Protocol is Becoming a Cornerstone?

For agentic commerce to move from experimentation to broad adoption, the ecosystem needs a shared language between agents, platforms, and merchant systems. That’s precisely the purpose of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) announced by Google at the NRF: to make exchanges more universal by enabling an agent to discover what a merchant supports, query critical information, and execute transactional steps more robustly.

Retailers should read this signal correctly. UCP isnʼt just “a technology announcement”. It’s an indicator of standardization. When a protocol emerges, it quickly influences how platforms, partners, and shopping surfaces shape their priorities and it accelerates the industrialization of a new channel.

What This Means in Practice? The Transaction Becomes a Compatible Process

In a more agentic commerce model, an agent needs reliable, structured, and up-to-date information to take action. Availability, pricing, variants, shipping and return policies, compliance, and even certain service rules must be expressed consistently. This is no longer only about convincing a customer or optimizing a product page, it’s also about making the offer executable in an environment where decisions and actions can be partially automated.

This compatibility directly impacts eCommerce architecture. The more a business relies on systems that can exchange information cleanly, the more capable it becomes of supporting agentic interactions. Conversely, an environment where data is fragmented, rules are implicit, or inventory and pricing donʼt reflect operational reality becomes difficult to align with agent-initiated journeys.

A Concrete Retail Example: How The Buying Journey Transforms?

Imagine a parent who needs to buy a rain jacket for their child’s farm trip in two days, with specific constraints: size, budget, waterproof performance, and either nearby store availability or express delivery. In today’s journey, the person opens a search engine, compares multiple sites, filters categories, reads sometimes incomplete descriptions, checks availability, starts over elsewhere if the right size is missing, and finally completes the purchase after multiple back-and-forth steps.

In an agentic journey via an assistant like Gemini, the intent is expressed once and the agent orchestrates the rest: it understands the constraints, queries compatible catalogs, checks available sizes in real time, proposes a few options that can actually be delivered within the required timeframe, then builds the cart and initiates the transaction—with final validation at checkout. The key difference isn’t only speed: it’s the displacement of the journey, moving from manual navigation to automated orchestration, where performance depends directly on the quality and readability of merchant data.

Why Shopify Merchants Are Well Positioned?

The competitive advantage isn’t simply being on a popular platform. It lies in the alignment between the platform, emerging standards, and the strength of data foundations. The fact that Shopify co-developed UCP with Google is a clear signal: Shopify is positioning its ecosystem to support increasingly agentic commerce experiences.

That doesn’t mean everything becomes automatic. It means the foundation is more favorable: a unified architecture, more advanced structuring practices, and product roadmaps aligned with emerging standards. In a world where AI discoverability and understanding depend heavily on data structure and consistency, platforms that accelerate these foundations give their merchants a structural advantage.

What Priorities Should Retailers Set For 2026?

Preparing for agentic commerce isn’t about “adding an agent” to your site. Real readiness starts with foundations that make the offer robust, readable, and reliable. In an agentic world, an inventory mismatch, an ambiguous policy, a poorly structured catalog, or incomplete data can translate into an impossible transaction or a loss of trust.

The first priority is to strengthen data quality and structure. The catalog must clearly express what the product is, its essential attributes, variants, and shipping and return conditions. The second priority is to improve the reliability of dynamic signals, especially inventory, pricing, and lead times. An agent doesn’t interact with a marketing promise; it interacts with operational reality. Finally, it’s essential to approach this topic through governance: which actions require confirmation, how exceptions are handled, and how substitutions, cancellations, and returns are managed.

A New Channel to Prepare For Now

Agentic commerce introduces a more structural kind of competition: retailers won’t only be compared on perceived value, but also on their ability to be understood and acted on efficiently by agents. Organizations that invest early in data structuring, operational reliability, and coherent architecture will be able to capture the benefits of this new channel sooner.

At Novatize, we observe that organizations moving fastest on these topics are those treating product data, integration, and governance as strategic assets on the same level as customer experience or merchandising. In 2026, preparing for agentic commerce means ensuring you can be discovered, understood, and transacted within a world where purchasing is increasingly orchestrated by agents.

Talk to a Novatize Expert

Would you like to assess whether your catalog, data, and eCommerce ecosystem are ready for agentic commerce? Contact a Novatize expert to discuss short-term priorities and concrete actions to implement.

About Novatize

Novatize supports organizations locally and internationally in designing and evolving their unified commerce and eCommerce ecosystems by aligning strategy, customer experience, and technology. Its team combines consulting expertise and delivery capabilities to provide tangible solutions tailored to the realities of retailers and brands. Through its strategic alliances, Novatize helps businesses accelerate their transformation and create lasting value.