Partnerships are the engine driving agentic commerce from pilots to scale.
The individual tools for agentic commerce, including AI models, data, selling platforms, and payment rails, remain fragmented. But partnerships will be necessary to stitch them into seamless customer journeys. Tech leaders, with their distribution power and financial infrastructure, are best positioned to control this shift.
Our analysis of CB Insights partnerships data across the major big tech and AI leaders found that 4 companies — OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, and Shopify — have emerged as gravitational centers. The 4 companies have struck 30+ partnerships in AI and agentic commerce over the last 2 years, compared with just a handful across the other tech leaders (Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA).
These collaborations underscore why partnerships will be essential as agentic commerce expands: not only do they accelerate adoption, but they will also determine who sets standards and owns customer relationships as agentic commerce matures.
