The Maze: Brands can prepare for AI shopping without making it their biggest growth bet. In a Profitero+ survey shared by Mike Black, 6% of leading brands put agentic commerce among their top two channels for understanding and growth over the next 12–36 months. Among other brands, 3% did. Agentic commerce means shopping with AI assistants that help people find and choose products. Social commerce, or buying through social platforms, ranks far higher. These figures measure priorities, not sales.
Established online retailers still get first billing. Pure-play retail, meaning online-focused sellers, attracts top-two selections from 71% of leaders and 69% of other brands. This is the largest category for both groups in the shared findings. Third-party marketplaces, where outside merchants sell through a platform, receive 42% and 37%. The survey treats these as separate channels, although their business models can overlap. The practical point is attention: emerging shopping routes compete with existing channels for a brand team's time. A promising new route does not remove the need to serve customers where they already shop.
Leaders make different choices within today's channels. Quick commerce and last-mile delivery, covering rapid local orders and the final trip to the customer, receive 47% of leaders' selections against 36% of others'. That is an 11 percentage-point gap. Omnichannel retailers, which combine stores and online sales, show the opposite pattern: 51% versus 67%, a 16-point gap. Here the source specifically describes online fulfilment for grocery and large store formats. Direct-to-consumer sales through brands' own storefronts receive 14% versus 20%. These comparisons suggest different mixes of attention, not a universal instruction to abandon stores or owned websites. They also do not show how much money each group spends.
Social shopping sits well ahead of AI shopping. Social commerce receives 31% of leaders' selections, compared with 6% for agentic commerce: a 25 percentage-point gap. Among other brands, the comparison is 27% versus 3%. A percentage point is the difference between two percentages; it is not the percentage growth of a channel. Leaders' agentic result is only three points above the other group's. The low starting values matter more than an impressive-sounding ratio. AI assistants may influence discovery without completing the purchase, so attention to them should not be confused with sales flowing through an autonomous checkout.
A priority ranking cannot prove the winning strategy. The 2026 benchmark surveyed more than 200 ecommerce executives, but its public landing page does not disclose subgroup sizes, geography or fieldwork dates. Black describes leaders as brands with at least 20% online market share and online sales growth of at least 20%; the full methodology sits behind a report form. The groups may differ in size, categories or resources. Their answers cannot establish that a channel choice caused stronger performance. The primary page's broader message is to maintain core channels while exploring emerging ones. It does not turn this survey into a forecast of consumer adoption.
Why it matters: For a brand choosing its next project, the useful distinction is between serving current demand and buying knowledge about a possible future channel. One practical approach is a small AI-shopping trial with a defined question: can customers find accurate product information, and does that help them reach a purchase? Keep larger commitments tied to observed results. That allocation lesson travels across markets; the survey percentages themselves cannot be assumed to represent any particular country, or the world.
