For retail leaders, the question is no longer whether to engage with agentic commerce, but how to design for it in a way that protects margins, enhances customer experience, and maintains trust.
At the same time, familiar pressures have not disappeared. Returns abuse continues to erode margins. Loyalty fraud remains difficult to detect. And many fraud systems were built for a version of commerce that assumed every interaction was human.
At NRF 2026, Forter joined Rajashree Rane of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Andrew Linn of PwC, and Forter’s Scott Buell for a candid conversation on how agentic commerce is reshaping the trust equation and how retailers can grow without compromising experience or profitability.
Why Retailers Still Have Time
Much of the conversation around AI shopping agents focuses on transactions. In reality, the impact retailers are seeing today is concentrated in discovery.
Consumers are increasingly using AI agents to discover products, compare options, and narrow choices. Worldwide Retail and Consumer Goods Business Development at AWS Rajashree Rane mentioned, “According to new data from Adobe, traffic from generative AI-powered shopping links to retail websites surged 4,700% year over year in July 2025, with with shoppers spending more time engaging and bouncing less when guided by AI retail assistants.”
Agent-mediated purchasing, however, remains limited in volume.
Across the Forter network, which represented roughly $500 billion in GMV in 2025, agentic transactions are still relatively small in number.
“There’s a perception that retailers are already behind,” said General Counsel and SVP of Corporate Strategy at Forter Scott Buell. “But when you look at the data, we’re still in the early days. Agentic commerce will be disruptive, but retailers have time to set a strategy and build the right trust foundations before it scales.”
Discovery has historically shifted before purchasing behavior followed, and agentic commerce is no different. Retailers who recognize this moment can modernize their trust and decisioning infrastructure now, before agent-mediated transactions scale.
The Trust Gap
Agentic interactions change who, or what, is interacting with a brand.
In traditional commerce, retailers rely on behavioral signals such as browsing patterns, session data, and device context to assess intent. In agentic channels, many of those signals are reduced or disappear entirely.
“We used to trust clicks, behavior, and patterns because they helped us understand where the customer was in their journey,” said AWS’ Rajashree Rane. “With agentic channels, it becomes much harder to understand who is behind the agent. That is the trust gap retailers are trying to solve.”
With less visibility, risk accumulates across the entire customer journey, from checkout and promotions to returns and loyalty. According to an NRF report, return fraud contributed $101 billion in overall losses for retailers in 2023. Moreover, for every $100 in returned merchandise, retailers will lose $13.70 to return fraudreturns abuse alone accounted for an estimated $101 billion in losses in the U.S. in 2023. Thinner signals only increase exposure.
Blocking vs. Building
When trust signals thin out, the instinct is to reduce exposure fast.
During the discussion, retailers in the audience voiced familiar concerns: uncertainty around liability, loss of control when agents mediate interactions, and hesitation to approve transactions they cannot fully see. For regulated categories and high-risk products, the stakes feel even higher.
Complicating matters further, the liability model has not yet evolved. Merchants still carry the risk even when transactions are initiated by third-party agents. Until accountability shifts, caution is understandable.
But broad restrictions come with tradeoffs. Blocking agent-driven traffic can prevent legitimate customers from discovering products, especially when agents are used for accessibility or convenience. And over time, it can quietly redirect demand elsewhere.
Blocking is a control. It is not a long-term strategy.
Identity Behind Every Interaction
What matters now is not how or where a shopper shows up, but whether retailers can recognize who is behind the interaction.
A loyal shopper using a new interface should not be treated as a first-time visitor. Without identity-based trust, many retailers have no reliable way to distinguish between them.
When agents sit between the customer and the retailer, trust shifts away from interface-based signals and toward identity, intent, and authority. Retailers must understand who is behind the interaction and whether the agent is acting within the permissions granted by the human it represents.
“As agentic commerce scales, trust cannot sit in one place,” said Rane. “Cloud infrastructure provides the foundation, but retailers need partners like Forter to help resolve identity and make real-time trust decisions when signals are thinner. That coordination across the ecosystem is what allows innovation to move forward safely.”
Identity-based decisioning replaces guesswork with continuity across interactions, channels, and tools. It enables more precise fraud prevention, stronger loyalty recognition, and consistent decisioning as new channels emerge.
Prepare Now, or Pay Later
Agentic commerce will not replace human shopping. It will sit alongside it as another channel, growing in influence as adoption increases.
Retailers do not need perfect answers today, but they do need foundations that can adapt as agentic commerce moves from experimentation to everyday reality.
That preparation starts with building a single view of the customer across human and agent-mediated interactions. And it means aligning fraud, product, and growth teams around identity-based decisioning rather than blanket restriction.
“Retailers need to shift from behavior-based fraud detection to identity-based trust frameworks now, before this gap becomes a major security vulnerability,” says Rane.
Many of the controls that worked even a year ago are already becoming constraints. The goal is not to loosen defenses indiscriminately, but to rebalance them, enabling discovery and access while tightening protection where it matters most.
“As commerce becomes more automated, fraud and abuse scale with it,” said Forter’s Scott Buell. “Decisions are made faster and with fewer traditional signals, which is exactly why retailers need identity-based decisioning that can approve good customers and stop abuse in real time.”
What Comes Next
Agentic commerce is still evolving, but its direction is clear. Discovery will continue to change first — transactions will follow — and systems built for yesterday’s signals will struggle to keep up.
Forter works alongside partners like AWS and PwC to help retailers build a trust infrastructure that evolves with commerce, linking identity, authority, and intent across the entire customer lifecycle.
The retailers that succeed will not be the ones that block change, but the ones that use this moment to prepare deliberately, building systems that can approve good intent, stop fraud, and scale with confidence as agentic commerce grows.
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