The next shift in B2B isn’t “agentic commerce.” It’s the agentic buyer.

But so what?
The real job right now is much simpler: Get Amazon-good.

One of the hardest parts of being a CEO in a tech startup is staying grounded in today while living in the future. “Seeing around corners” is a powerful skill, but being early and being wrong are often the same thing.

With AI FOMO at frothy levels, it feels like a good moment to slow down and get grounded.

So let’s start with the obvious questions.

Is agentic commerce real? Yes. But not yet. Not really.
Will it be game-changing? Probably.
When will it be here at scale? Faster than most people think, but slower than those of us mainlining AI kool-aid would like to believe. Call it five years.

Cue the reactions.
The AI maximalists saying, “You could vibe-code this in an hour.”
The modern Luddites shaking their canes: “We’ll always need people.”

Both miss the point.

So let’s look at reality today.
Boring? Yes.
Helpful? Ideally.

How buyers learn what to expect

If you want a fast way to predict what customers will demand at work, don’t overthink it.
Just watch how we behave everywhere else.

We don’t “run errands” anymore. We tap a screen.
We’re annoyed by vague ETAs. We want to track the little dot.
We don’t accept “someone will call you back” as a system.
We expect confirmation, a timeline, and a way to self-serve answers when things change.

For the last twenty years, consumer software has trained us to expect the basics:
clarity, speed, visibility, and control.

So of course those expectations show up at work.

And yet in B2B- especially in the distribution of physical goods- an enormous amount of commerce still runs through inboxes, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and heroics.

This isn’t because companies don’t care.
It’s because these industries are complex by nature: living catalogs, negotiated pricing, shifting lead times, constant exceptions.

But here’s the line that matters:

You can’t make that complexity your customer’s problem anymore.

The Amazon effect isn’t theoretical

The proof isn’t in headlines. It’s in conversations.

In 2024 and 2025, I spoke with countless leadership teams who told me some version of:
“Improving our online customer experience is a top priority this year.”

And as far as I can tell, most haven’t been able to move meaningfully on it.

That’s not a critique- it’s a signal.

The “Amazon effect” isn’t optional anymore.
But getting your data clean and organized enough to support it is genuinely hard.

So instead of trying to solve for agentic commerce, many companies are just trying to get their house in order to meet today’s customer expectations and live to fight another day.

Put differently: we’re at step two, planning for step five, while steps three and four are still a mess.

Why I’m confident saying this

I’ve been around enough cycles to recognize a real shift when it starts compounding.

• I built an ecommerce business in the early 2000s, when simply being online (and not terrible) was enough to win.

• Later, I built cloud-native enterprise software when the cloud was still new, deploying it into over a thousand companies.

• In freight, I’ve helped build digital-first brokerage models that moved hundreds of millions of dollars across distributors, retailers, and manufacturers.

I’m fairly sure I built the first “Expedia for Canadian LTL freight” back in 2010.

I’m not saying this to impress anyone. I’m saying it to make a point: buyer behaviour moves fast once tools and expectations align.

And companies that treat these shifts as “something we’ll get to” are fine- until they aren’t.

The numbers describe today

• 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience for routine purchases. Not because they hate sales — but because they want self-serve by default.

• 39% are comfortable placing orders over $500K through self-serve digital or remote channels, up more than 50% from two years ago.

• Buyers spend only 17% of their time meeting with suppliers during a purchase journey.

Those aren’t future stats. They describe how buyers want to buy now.

So when we say, “We need to improve our online experience,” we’re not talking about a nice-to-have. We’re talking about the primary buying channel.

Why being “Amazon-good” is so hard

This is where a lot of AI writing in B2B loses credibility. It assumes companies are behind because they’re slow or stubborn.

The reality is more nuanced.

• Pricing isn’t a number, it’s a logic tree.

• Availability is fluid. Lead times shift. Exceptions are constant.

• Truth lives across systems (and often inside people’s heads).

• Customer experience spans Sales, Ops, CS, Finance, the warehouse, and IT.

So what happens?

Customer experience depends on heroics. A few great people hold everything together with memory and hustle.

If you’re a customer, it can feel magical if you talk to the right person at the right time.
If you run the business, it’s fragile, exhausting, and impossible to scale.

That is the real today problem.

Where agentic commerce actually fits

Agentic commerce is inevitable, but it’s tomorrow’s layer.

Strip away the jargon:

An AI agent is software that can take action, follow steps, and move work forward under supervision.

An agentic buyer is what happens when customers use those agents to reduce buying busywork: quoting, reordering, tracking, chasing updates.

If the last decade was “buyers want to buy online,”
the next decade is “buyers want buying handled.”

But here’s the point that matters:

Agentic commerce is not the right problem to lead with today.

Why Amazon-good is the right preparation

A world-class online experience isn’t just defensive. It’s the foundation agentic buyers will depend on later.

That foundation looks unglamorous:

• One version of the truth about what you sell

• Pricing that’s consistent and explainable

• Availability and lead times that reflect reality

• Clean reordering

• Status and tracking without chasing

• Proactive exception handling

If you can do this for humans, you’re building something else at the same time: a legible business.

And legibility is what AI systems require.

Agentic buying will reward the same suppliers who are Amazon-good today.
Same discipline. Same data. Same payoff.

What I’d do first

Start where friction is most expensive:

1. Visibility and exceptions

2. Reordering and repeat purchases

3. Pricing clarity

4. One coherent customer front door

This work is practical, mostly non-technical, and immediately valuable. And it quietly prepares you for what comes next.

The Manifesto

The companies that win the next decade won’t be the ones talking the loudest about AI.
They’ll be the ones who do the unglamorous work of becoming easy to do business with.

In B2B, we’ve confused relationships with friction for too long.
Real trust is built when buying and resolving issues is straightforward (without drama).

Get Amazon-good, and you’ll serve customers better today, reduce team burnout, and be ready for the agentic buyer without gambling on a buzzword.

Agentic commerce is coming. But if we’re serious about helping customers now, we start here.