Tony Wood examines how agentic commerce restructures the commerce value chain. Platform lock-in through trust ownership, the merchant-of-record question, and disintermediation dynamics..
| Dimension | Traditional UX | Agentic Experience Design (AXD) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary material | Attention and affordance | Trust and delegation |
| User state | Present, navigating | Absent, delegating |
| Design output | Screens and interfaces | Outcomes and constraints |
| Temporal model | Session-based | Relationship-based |
| Success metric | Task completion | Trust calibration |
The traditional commerce value chain - manufacturer to distributor to retailer to customer - assumed a human customer navigating a linear path from discovery to purchase. Agentic commerce inserts a new layer between the customer and the retailer: the agent layer. This layer controls information flow, evaluates merchants, and executes transactions on behalf of the human principal. The agent layer becomes a control point that can redirect value capture away from traditional platforms (Amazon,
Platform lock-in through trust ownership occurs when an agent platform (such as ChatGPT, Google, or Apple) becomes the primary trust intermediary between human principals and merchants. If the human trusts the agent platform, and the agent platform controls which merchants the agent evaluates, the platform can extract rent from every transaction - through commission, preferred placement fees, or data monetisation. This is structurally similar to how Amazon controls the marketplace, but applied
The merchant-of-record question is one of the most consequential unresolved issues in agentic commerce. When an agent purchases on behalf of a human principal, who bears the legal and financial responsibility for the transaction? The merchant who fulfilled the order? The agent platform that mediated the transaction? The human principal who delegated the authority? Current commerce law assumes a direct relationship between buyer and seller. Agentic commerce introduces an intermediary - the agen
Every technological shift in commerce has restructured the value chain. The internet moved power from physical retailers to platforms. Mobile moved power from desktops to app stores. Social commerce moved power from search engines to social networks. Each shift created new control points - positions in the value chain where an actor could extract disproportionate value by controlling information flow, customer access, or transaction infrastructure. This essay examines how the traditional commerce value chain is being restructured by autonomous agents. It maps the new control points, analyses the dynamics of platform lock-in through trust ownership, confronts the unresolved merchant-of-record question, and argues that the value chain of the agentic era will be governed not by attention or distribution, but by I. The Traditional Commerce Value Chain and Its Assumptions The traditional commerce value chain is a linear sequence: manufacturer produces goods, distributor aggregates and moves them, retailer presents them to customers, and the customer selects and purchases. Digital commerce compressed this chain - manufacturers could sell direct, platforms could aggregate millions of sellers, and customers could compare across the entire market from a single interface - but the fundamental assumption remained: the customer is a human being who discovers, evaluates, and purchases through a visual interface. This assumption shaped every layer of the value chain. Marketing exists to capture human attention. Visual merchandising exists to influence human perception. Checkout flows exist to reduce human friction. Customer support exists to resolve human confusion. Loyalty programmes exist to exploit human psychology. The entire infrastructure of digital commerce is optimised for a human customer who sees, feels, hesitates, and decides. The platforms that dominate digital commerce - Amazon, Shopify, Google Shopping, Meta Commerce - captured their positions by controlling the cho