Fewer Visitors, 3X the Conversion: Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Chuck Gahun Discusses 'The State of Agentic Commerce (Q2)'
Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail TrendShow Notes
This one's a research deep dive. Forrester just published "The State of Agentic Commerce" for Q2 2026, a client-only report built on a fresh consumer survey, and its headline read like a splash of cold water: the hype is running past reality. We invited principal analyst Chuck Gahun on Retailgentic to defend that framing, walk through Forrester's (strict) definition of agentic commerce, and separate what consumers are actually doing from what the market keeps promising.
Highlights Shopping vs. buying: Forrester defines agentic commerce as “shopping or buying experiences that include AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of consumers, buyers, or sellers”, and until buying is involved, they call it conversational commerce, not agentic commerce. The 38 / 17 gap: Among consumers familiar with answer engines, 38% use them for product discovery but only 17% complete purchases, a trust gap Chuck says is the single thing holding agentic commerce back. Who’s liable?: When something goes wrong on an answer-engine purchase, 44% of consumers said they’d hold the answer engine itself liable, a sign of how many guardrails, policies, and return paths still have to be built. The Amazon corollary: “On Amazon, I’d let my kids, my friends, my family have my credit card and go shopping.” That same trust does not yet transfer to ChatGPT or Gemini, closing that gap is the whole game. The merchant verdict: “We’re not telling anybody to wait. We’re telling them to go in strategically while the commerce trust angle is catching up.” Machine advantage: Forrester’s four-quadrant merchant framework (agentic fit, machine advantage, operations, and organizational adaptability) pushes brands to build content strategy for machines, not just humans. The SKU mountain: The hardest conversation in the field, “you need to upgrade 100,000 SKUs,” and the merchant answers that one SKU takes six months, so “this is gonna take infinite years.” Protocols like OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP keep changing underneath them, on an exponential curve. Old B2B PDFs are gold mines: Those spec-heavy, JavaScript-free product pages everyone mocked turn out to be exactly what agents want, and Chuck says B2B (business & industrial) is actually taking off faster, with a report prediction that 20% of B2B moves to human-authorized, agent-executed transactions by year-end. Death of the retail website?: A companion Forrester paper argues the website isn’t dead, it’s becoming a repository of data for agents. By 2030, Chuck expects “dual optimization”: machines bring the shopper, and the site’s only job is to convert them. Less traffic, 3X conversion: Organic traffic is down, but answer engines filter the traffic so well that conversions are up. A sharp, honest look at where agentic commerce actually is right now: the trust gap, the merchant playbook, and a few 2030 predictions worth arguing about. Enjoy the conversation
Timestamps: 03:47 Meet Chuck Gahun, Forrester principal analyst 05:03 Chuck's background: two decades, Sapient, the services side 07:57 How Forrester's commerce team is structured 10:52 Defining agentic commerce: shopping vs. buying 12:37 Conversational commerce vs. the strict definition 13:49 Semi-autonomous vs. autonomous (the dog-treats test) 14:38 Inside the answer-engine consumer survey 15:47 The numbers: 38% discover, 17% buy, 62% research 16:22 Beyond retail: healthcare, travel, government 19:48 Figure 1: owned vs. not-owned, four levels 21:47 The trust gap and who's liable (44%) 24:37 Marketplaces, merchant of record, and returns 27:52 What Forrester tells merchants: don't wait 29:57 Product fit, profitability, and the ACP/UCP specs 31:58 Figure 3: the four-quadrant framework & machine advantage 35:53 The SKU problem and exponential change management 38:35 The B2B surge prediction 41:25 2030 predictions & death of the retail website 46:32 Less traffic, higher conversion: the 3X surprise 47:18 Where to find Chuck, events, and outro 👉 Connect with Chuck: https:/
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