On May 14, 2026, WooCommerce published the results of a survey they ran at Stripe Sessions 2026. They set up a booth, asked 225 commerce leaders where agentic commerce is headed, and got answers that are less reassuring than most AI optimism would suggest. The top answer across every industry segment was consumer trust. The second answer depended entirely on who was answering. And the question nobody could agree on — who owns the customer relationship when an AI agent buys something on your behalf — split almost exactly three ways.
This is not a theoretical problem. Visa's April 2026 B2AI survey found that only 38% of consumers are comfortable with an AI agent completing a purchase. Sixty percent would not let an agent spend any amount without prior approval. Shoppers are still the ones clicking buy. But the discovery layer — how they find products in the first place — is already shifting to AI, and that shift is happening faster than most merchants realize.
Discovery moves first, checkout moves later
When WooCommerce asked which part of commerce will be most disrupted by AI agents over the next three years, search and discovery topped the list at 26%. Ecommerce platforms came in right behind at 24%. Advertising and paid acquisition followed at 17%. The pattern is consistent: respondents expect AI to change how shoppers find products before it changes how they buy them.
That timeline matters if your business depends on demand generation. If you run Google Ads, invest in SEO, or pay for social media reach, the channel through which customers discover you is the one most likely to be disrupted first. An AI agent that recommends a product based on a user's stated needs — "I need a waterproof jacket for hiking under $150" — bypasses the entire search-and-click funnel that ecommerce has been built on for two decades.
Brand and retailer respondents picked advertising as the most disrupted category. The broader audience of software builders and agencies saw their own markets shifting first. Both groups are looking at different links in the same chain, and both are probably right.
The trust gap is real, and it runs through everything
The most common pairing in the survey was consumer trust and payment infrastructure, named by 24% of respondents. Trust showed up in four of the five most common pairings. The second factor, though, split along industry lines.
Six percent paired trust with AI quality — a bet that the model itself is the deciding factor. If an AI agent recommends or buys the wrong thing, the rails do not matter. Twelve percent paired trust with open protocols or payment infrastructure — a bet on the plumbing. Get the rails right and the rest follows. Eleven percent paired trust with regulation — a focus on liability. When an agent buys something on your behalf, who is accountable when something goes wrong?
Nobody agreed on the second factor. Everyone agreed on the first. That tells you something about where the actual bottleneck is. The technology is moving fast. The willingness to trust it is not.
Who owns the customer? Nobody knows yet.
This was the question with the least agreement and arguably the biggest strategic stakes. The split was 32% to 28%, with another 29% combined in "too early to say" or "shared and undefined." Among brands and retailers — the people whose customer relationships are actually at stake — "too early to say" was the top answer.
The comparison to marketplaces is instructive. Merchants who kept their own customer relationships did fine when marketplace terms changed. The ones who let the marketplace own everything — the customer data, the purchase history, the whole relationship — learned that those customers belonged to the platform, not to them. The same dynamic is playing out with AI agents, and the rules are not written yet.
AI agents are already becoming a commerce channel. They handle discovery, recommendations, and in some cases initiate purchases. But merchants still own fulfillment, returns, the support queue, the loyalty program, and the follow-up email. The relationship, basically. The question is whether that matters when the agent is the one the customer trusts.
What WooCommerce is doing about it
WooCommerce is not waiting for the industry to figure this out. On June 3, 2026, the WooCommerce developer blog announced a live panel discussion for June 30 on practical AI workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce. The panel includes folks from SkyVerge, GoDaddy, Automattic, and Pressable, and will cover WooCommerce MCP, the WordPress Abilities API, and how developers can make their plugins and workflows agent-ready.
The Abilities API is the piece that matters most for developers. Landed in WordPress 6.9 with a JavaScript counterpart in 7.0, it gives AI tools a structured way to understand what a plugin can do — not just its endpoints, but its capabilities, permissions, and constraints. If you build WooCommerce extensions, this is the API that will let AI agents interact with your plugin without custom integration work for every agent platform.
The clock is ticking
The survey data paints a clear picture: agentic commerce is coming, discovery is shifting first, and the trust gap is the real bottleneck. Merchants have a window — probably two to three years — to figure out how to maintain customer relationships as AI agents become a commerce channel. The ones who treat this as someone else's problem will find themselves in the same position as merchants who let Amazon own their customer base a decade ago.
If you run a WooCommerce store, the immediate action items are straightforward. Start testing the Abilities API. Register for the June 30 live event. And think seriously about what "agent-ready" means for your store — because the agents are already shopping, whether your store is ready or not.