For the past two years, retail has talked about AI mostly in terms of chatbots and recommendation engines: tools that suggest, but leave the clicking, comparing and paying for humans. That era is ending.
Agentic commerce describes the next stage, where an AI agent does not just recommend a product but completes the purchase on a shopper's behalf, comparing prices, checking delivery windows and finishing checkout with little or no manual input.
It has become one of the most used terms in retail marketing this year, and for good reason.
• Google launched its Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation event in January 2026, giving AI agents a standard way to read merchant catalogues and complete transactions.
• OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, which arrived a few months earlier, is doing something similar for ChatGPT, now used by hundreds of millions of people weekly, a meaningful share of whom are already using it to research and buy products.
• Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout around the same time.
• Shopify has reported that orders originating from AI powered search grew fifteen times year on year through 2025.
• McKinsey puts a number where this leads: as much as three to five trillion dollars of global retail spend could shift towards agent mediated buying by 2030.
Most coverage of agentic commerce treats it as a US led shift that other markets will eventually catch up to. That framing does not hold for the Gulf.
• 79% of UAE consumers already feel comfortable letting an AI complete a purchase for them (Checkout.com, Agentic Commerce 2026).
• 64% say they would trust an AI shopping agent's judgement over that of their own family when making a buying decision.
• UAE consumers who have not yet used agentic tools expect them to handle a tenth or more of their online shopping within the next twelve months.
• Over half of shoppers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have already used AI powered visual search while shopping online.
The infrastructure is catching up too. Amazon's Rufus assistant is already alive for shoppers in Saudi Arabia, guiding product discovery and purchase decisions inside the Amazon Shopping app. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 continues to push deep digital integration across retail, and Deloitte's research on AI adoption in the region found that more than eight in ten organisations across Saudi Arabia and the UAE feel real pressure to adopt AI now rather than later. The UAE's AI retail market alone is forecast to nearly quadruple by 2030, according to Grand View Research.
Put simply, MENA shoppers are not a secondary audience for agentic commerce. In several respects, they are the audience defining what fast adoption looks like.
The practical shift is this: an AI agent evaluating your product does not browse the way a person does. It reads structured data, compares it against a shopper's stated intent and either includes your offer in its shortlist or skips it entirely, often without a human ever seeing that your product existed as an option.
That makes a few things newly essential for any brand selling online in the region:
Pricing, availability, delivery windows and return policies all need to be consistent and machine readable, not buried in a PDF or a customer service script. An agent that cannot parse your terms quickly will simply move to a competitor that can.
Search engine optimisation is no longer only about ranking on a results page. Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation, tuning content so AI systems can accurately summarise and recommend a brand, are becoming just as important as traditional SEO.
For MENA specifically, Arabic and English product data both need to be complete and accurate. Agents serving Gulf shoppers will increasingly query in both languages, and gaps in either will cost visibility.
Agent referred traffic and agent completed purchases deserve their own reporting line, distinct from organic and paid channels, so brands can see what this shift is actually doing to revenue rather than guessing.
This is precisely the kind of shift our ASAAS framework, our foundation for growth in the MENA region, is built to handle: data informed, actionable planning against a genuinely new set of buying behaviours, not a bolted on tactic.
In practice, that means:
• Auditing product feeds and commerce tech stacks for agent readability
• Extending SEO and content programmes to cover answer and generative engine optimisation
• Building the analytics layer needed to track agent driven revenue alongside every other channel
For brands already investing in marketplace strategy, performance marketing or MarTech with Calibrate, agentic commerce is not a separate workstream. It is the next layer on top of the growth foundation already in place.
The Takeaway
Agentic commerce will not replace every kind of shopping, and plenty of purchases, from browsing a new fashion line to choosing a gift, will stay firmly human led for good reason. But for considered, repeat and comparison heavy purchases, the shift towards AI agents completing transactions is well underway, and MENA shoppers are moving with it faster than most regions in the world.
Brands that treat this as a future problem risk finding out the hard way that they were never in the running. The ones who prepare their data, content and measurement now will be the ones AI agents actually recommend when it matters.
