Agentic AI is not the future of commerce media. It’s already here, shaping how consumers shop and how brands reach them. The question now is precisely how it will change the shopping journey and who stands to win in this new environment.

To understand exactly how this transition is playing out across the broader industry, we surveyed 750 consumers and 150 senior commerce media leaders across the US, UK and Germany. The findings, published in “The State of Agentic Commerce (Media): How Agentic AI is Reshaping Control, Value and Monetization,” cut through the hype and show a market already in motion. Seventy-five percent of US consumers say they are comfortable with AI helping them choose what to buy, representing rapid and broad acceptance of the technology in only a few years. The results also show that as shoppers increasingly use AI, they become even more comfortable with it.

At the same time, consumers are drawing a clear distinction between agentic shopping and agentic purchasing. They are comfortable with AI helping them research products, compare options, identify better deals and narrow choices. They are less comfortable allowing AI to fully complete transactions without their approval. A similar pattern is emerging among advertisers and commerce media network operators. Most are looking for agentic AI to do a majority of the work, with human approvals built in.

As a result, AI is fundamentally changing where the advantage in commerce media comes from. The strategies, capabilities and infrastructure that defined success for the past decade are being replaced by new ones.

At Koddi, we have been building for this moment. We power commerce media for some of the world's largest retailers and marketplaces. Our research surfaces insights that the industry is only beginning to articulate: commerce media is becoming a decision economy and transitioning from a model based on impressions on visible ad placements to one that focuses on influence within AI systems. The most important factor in an agentic world is not the ad position on a page. It is inclusion by the AI systems that increasingly decide what gets recommended to consumers.

Here are the rules that will determine how to win with commerce media in a world of agentic AI.

Rule 1: Consumers want AI to do the research, but not make the call

Shoppers are genuinely open to AI filtering, comparing and shortlisting products on their behalf. But they draw the line at giving AI access to their wallet. While 64% are in favor of it suggesting brands they might not usually consider, just 20% are comfortable with AI acting independently. Making a purchase without approval would be the single biggest trust-breaker, cited by 55% of consumers.

The opportunity in agentic commerce is therefore concentrated at the research and recommendation level, where consumer acceptance is high and they are genuinely open to AI-mediated brand discovery. That is also precisely where integrated commerce media platforms that seamlessly connect data and decisions can make a major impact.

Rule 2: Influence is the new placement

AI places an entirely new layer between brand and consumer: the shortlist. Products that are not surfaced during AI-mediated discovery are all but invisible to that shopper.

The industry has registered this. In our research, 84% of commerce media leaders said they would invest in opportunities designed to increase their visibility within AI-generated answers and recommendations and 61% are already drawing that funding from performance and paid search budgets.

These opportunities include paid inclusion in shortlists and sponsored recommendation slots. But they also involve less visible elements, such as data feeds, integrations with AI agents and cross-agent orchestration tools that enable brands to operate across multiple platforms.

Rule 3: Full automation isn’t the goal

The overwhelming preference across the industry is for AI to surface insights and propose actions and humans to make the final decision. In our research, only 3% of commerce media leaders favor environments where AI has an almost free hand and workers are primarily limited to oversight and compliance. Full autonomy is not where the market is heading.

The companies pulling ahead in agentic commerce are not necessarily automating the most. They are those building the infrastructure that makes human and AI collaboration work reliably at scale, across different networks, protocols and data environments. Koddi’s AI tools are built for exactly this, enabling real-time diagnostics, automation and direct action, all within the same workflows and access controls that commerce media teams already rely on.

Rule 4: Measurement is where agentic commerce gets serious

With agentic AI poised to reshape the shopping journey, it’s clear that new methods of measurement and attribution will be needed. In our study, 33% of respondents said that current gaps in these systems were holding back investment. Our research shows that a third of advertisers plan to allocate between $250,000 and $1 million to agentic AI products in the next 12 months. At those levels, they need to show ROI.

The challenge is compounded by fragmentation. There are competing ecosystems with different feed structures, checkout flows and attribution models. Organizations operating across multiple networks are solving several measurement problems simultaneously. Ninety-two percent of respondents plan to invest in agent-specific measurement and diagnostics and 80% would invest in measurement tools tied to AI-mediated journeys. The companies that crack attribution across these fragmented environments first have the evidence to keep scaling while others stall.

The next wave

Commerce media is moving from surfaces to systems and the organizations navigating that transition most effectively share a common thread: they are investing in the infrastructure that agentic commerce actually runs on.

Currently, most organizations are using AI to support or make decisions within existing frameworks and systems. But the next wave of innovation is already coming into view. Over the next 18 months, we will see the market move towards new monetization models and advertiser offerings designed especially for agentic environments. This is where competitive advantage will be won.

Koddi has spent more than a decade building at this exact intersection, powering billions in media spend for some of the world's largest retailers, marketplaces and travel platforms. We are not watching agentic AI reshape commerce media from the outside. We are operating inside it, helping brands and networks move from visibility to selectability, from placements to influence, from impressions to outcomes. The decision economy is here. And the distance between the companies that understand that and those that do not is growing every day.