Agentic Commerce: Redefining E-Commerce across UCP, Web MCP, and Physical Retail
E-commerce is undergoing its most profound technological shift yet: moving from active user navigation to Agentic Commerce, where autonomous AI agents discover, configure, and purchase products on our behalf. But how do system architectures adapt when our primary counterpart is no longer a human browsing a screen, but a Large Language Model executing transactions? In this talk, we will explore the evolving geography of digital commerce by comparing key protocol paradigms: the native backend approach of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) launched by Google and Shopify, the financial/transactional framework of OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and the client-side approach of Web MCP. We will demonstrate how this revolution extends far beyond traditional online storefronts to empower the physical retail space. Through a real-world storytelling lens focused on travel retail and high-traffic environments (railway stations, airports), we will examine how sharing real-time catalogs, inventory, and capabilities via APIs allows AI agents to manage context-aware orders and pickups in physical locations. Finally, we will dive into concrete architectural patterns for enabling this transition: designing a serverless middleware on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Firestore, Vertex AI) to deliver low-lateny responses, "AI-Ready" data structures, and resilient fallback strategies when physical and digital workflows converge.