Nov 6, 2025 | 6 minute read
written by David Stover
As VP of Product at Elastic Path, I spend every day thinking about what comes next in commerce, not just the next product release, but the next paradigm. Over the past year, we’ve been defining and evangelizing Intelligent Commerce, our overarching vision for adaptive, AI-driven commerce experiences that connect context, automation, and insight across the entire buyer journey.
Intelligent Commerce is the umbrella that Agentic Commerce sits within. It represents the natural evolution toward a world where intelligent agents shop, negotiate, and execute purchases on behalf of humans and businesses. This next phase builds on the same principles that have guided our product strategy from the beginning: composability, contextual data access, and API-first flexibility, now extended into an agent-powered future.
At Elastic Path, we understand that shift is already underway. Our platform is built to support it, not just conceptually, but technically, with the APIs, context, and composability required for agents to operate safely and intelligently within commerce ecosystems.
AGNTCY is a new global initiative focused on building open standards for agentic interoperability, ensuring that autonomous agents can securely discover, communicate, and transact across digital ecosystems. By defining shared protocols for identity, messaging, and trust, AGNTCY aims to make agent-to-agent and agent-to-platform collaboration as seamless and standardized as today’s web APIs.
The MACH Alliance has recognized AGNTCY as a cornerstone of its next evolution, extending its commitment to Modular, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless architectures into the agentic era. The initiative is designed to help organizations prepare for a world where AI agents interact directly with composable systems.
At Elastic Path, we’re proud to be among the early adopters embracing the principles behind AGNTCY. Our roadmap and product initiatives - from MCP Servers for context-aware access, to agent-safe endpoint separation, to AI-driven shopper and merchandiser experiences - are directly aligned with AGNTCY’s goals. By exposing our APIs through structured, standards-based interfaces, we are ensuring that Elastic Path is not just compatible with AGNTCY’s framework, but foundational to its success.
This alignment reinforces our position as the commerce core of the future, one that can seamlessly power both human and agentic experiences, within the open, interoperable ecosystem the MACH Alliance is now championing.
The emergence of AI shopping agents marks a turning point in how commerce will function. These agents will:
In this new world, brands need a commerce platform that can interact directly with agents, exposing secure, contextual endpoints while maintaining clear boundaries between shopper and administrative operations. That’s exactly where Elastic Path excels.
Elastic Path’s architecture is already designed for agent readiness. Our API-first, headless foundation ensures any system, human interface or autonomous agent, can safely and predictably interact with commerce functions.
Here’s how we align with AGNTCY and the broader agentic ecosystem:
Our Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers provide agents with context-aware access to Elastic Path APIs. This means an AI agent can operate within defined scopes — for example, shopper interactions, catalog browsing, or quote creation — while respecting the security boundaries that separate admin endpoints.
Agents working through our MCP Servers can retrieve contextual commerce data like product details, account information, and entitlements without ever overstepping into administrative controls.
Elastic Path has long supported role-based separation across shopper, merchandiser, and administrative endpoints. As agents become first-class actors in commerce, this separation becomes even more critical.
This structure ensures agents participate in commerce safely, performing bounded actions without risk to the platform’s integrity or the merchant’s data.
Every commerce experience, whether driven by a human, a custom UI, or an AI agent, depends on flexible APIs. Elastic Path’s composable services expose every critical operation via API, including:
This API surface provides the foundation for agents to not only consume data but also take action from building carts to negotiating quotes or managing renewals.
We believe the future of commerce will depend on open standards. That’s why Elastic Path is committed to working within emerging frameworks like AGNTCY to ensure agents can:
Our goal is to make Elastic Path’s APIs and MCP context layers interoperable, so agents built for one ecosystem can operate confidently in another without proprietary restrictions.
While our architecture aligns naturally with AGNTCY’s mission, one of the most powerful enablers of intelligent and agentic commerce within Elastic Path is our catalog. It’s the connective tissue that bridges human experiences, automated workflows, and now - agentic interactions.
Our catalog is uniquely designed for flexibility and context. It supports multiple account hierarchies, dynamic catalog views, personalized price books, and entitlement-based visibility, all exposed through clean APIs. This design ensures that both human users and autonomous agents can access exactly the right product, pricing, and configuration data for any scenario.
In a world where AI agents will browse, compare, and negotiate on behalf of their users, catalog intelligence becomes a differentiator. Agents require structured and contextual access to catalog data, not just raw product feeds, to make meaningful purchase decisions. Elastic Path’s catalog delivers that capability by enabling:
This is what makes Elastic Path the commerce core of the future - a platform that can serve both human and agentic experiences with equal precision and intelligence, all within the open, interoperable ecosystem the MACH Alliance is now championing.
Our team is already building AI-driven shopping experiences that showcase the power of this vision:
Each of these use cases depends on the same principles - composable APIs, context-based permissions, and clear endpoint separation - the exact foundation that AGNTCY and other agentic standards are designed to support.
Agentic commerce isn’t just an evolution in technology; it’s a redefinition of how digital business will operate. Merchants won’t just sell to customers, they’ll sell through agents acting on behalf of those customers. Elastic Path’s flexible, API-first foundation ensures that every brand powered by our platform is ready for that future.
By working within emerging standards like AGNTCY and exposing our APIs through secure, context-aware MCP endpoints, Elastic Path ensures that AI agents can participate in commerce safely, intelligently, and at scale.
As commerce shifts toward automation and intelligence, Elastic Path is leading the way. We will continue to:
Elastic Path was built for the future of commerce and with AGNTCY, that future is arriving faster than ever.
Schedule a demo to see how Elastic Path delivers unified commerce for leading global brands.