Why now is the time to plan your roadmap for agentic commerce success

The recently released Havas Commerce Trends Report 2026 reinforces that ecommerce is entering the era of agentic commerce – where AI agents handle discovery, comparison, and selection on behalf of consumers. In this era, growth is no longer determined by persuasion, but by eligibility: whether your systems provide consistent, machine-readable proof that you keep your operational promises.

Consumers are ready for this shift, with a third of UK adults already saying they’re open to an AI personal shopping agent. In this context, the priority will be to build infrastructures that agents can interpret with confidence - architectures where data is consistent, integrations are reliable, and operational signals match the promises made to customers.

But it’s important that the customer isn’t forgotten; they still play a key role in the purchase journey, loyalty, and continued growth. The brands that thrive in 2026 will be those that treat machine readability and the human experience as two sides of the same coin. 

Why a roadmap matters now

Eligibility - the likelihood of being surfaced and selected by an AI agent - becomes a function of data quality, architectural coherence, and operational consistency. Agentic commerce, therefore, requires end-to-end integration across OMS, PIM, pricing engines, inventory systems, and service logic.

Consumers, however, will still decide who deserves their attention and loyalty, and they require clarity, established trust, and frictionless journeys. 

Your approach will need to address both sides of the coin: precision for the ‘machine’ and experience for the human. A roadmap will be the best tool you have for setting a path that aligns these parallel priorities and coordinates the decisions, capabilities and investments that support both.

It will help you:

1. Sequence the right foundations
To ensure machine-facing data and operational work happens early while customer-facing improvements progress in parallel. facing data and operational work happens early while customer facing improvements progress in parallel.

2. Integrate technology with human-centred design
To pair architectural changes with thoughtful UX and content design, so both machine readability and human experience improve together.

3. Strengthen governance and consistency
To create the structures that keep your data, pricing, availability, and fulfilment signals stable and trustworthy for both agents and people. 

4. Unify all touchpoints
To coordinate catalogues, content standards, and service logic so experiences feel coherent, and machines receive consistent, structured data. 

5. Embed partner technology effectively
To ensure platforms are implemented in ways that lift both eligibility for agents and quality of the human journey. 

6. Set dual measures of progress
To define KPIs for agent eligibility and customer experience, so you advance both without sacrificing one for the other.

How Inviqa helps

At Inviqa, we don’t treat roadmaps as a simple step-by-step implementation of technology; it’s an orchestrated transformation designed to turn digital strategy into a prioritised and realistic action plan.

We apply the right governance frameworks and experience design (XD & UX) capabilities to ensure every digital touchpoint throughout an omnichannel journey delivers an intuitive, high converting experience. 

Rather than bolting compliance on at the end, we bake it in from the start, and we do the same for accessibility. Every design decision will align with your brand identify while optimising for retail media, social commerce, and agentic context. 

Plus, this roadmap will bend and flex to take into account changes in the landscape that impact your organisation.

Partners that power the journey

Smart tech partners, like BigCommerce and Feedonomics, will be key enablers in this new ecosystem. BigCommerce provides an ecommerce platform with powerful core features for multi-storefront agility, integration with best-of-breed services for payments, shipping, marketing, and more, and agentic commerce capabilities, making catalogues discoverable to LLMs and enabling instant checkout.

This composability is a major advantage for modern commerce as exemplified by SportShoes.com. The brand was able to double its checkout conversions by tapping into BigCommerce’s API-driven multi-storefront capability. The composable tech also enabled the UK sports retailer to launch a mobile app, which was previously out of reach with its legacy system.

Feedonomics then allows for effective expansion, acting as the engine room for feed orchestration, automating optimisations and data enrichment across marketplaces, retail media networks, and social platforms. 
Together, they reduce complexity and accelerate scale, while Inviqa integrates these capabilities with governance and human-centred design to deliver measurable outcomes: higher engagement, improved conversion, and stronger loyalty.

Agentic commerce doesn’t mean a loss of control. It simply shifts what creates influence. Instead of relying mainly on marketing, influence will come from the strength of your systems and data, and from reliable operations that machines can verify. The organisations that act now will set the standard for everyone else to follow, and their data quality and service consistency will become the benchmark others will have to match.

Inviqa, along with our partners at Commerce, can help you become that organisation that sets the standard. Get in touch today to learn how together, we can help you build the systems, data foundation and customer experience needed to lead in the era of agentic commerce.