The trust gap that will decide agentic commerce in Asian retail

Trust begins with knowing the customer as one person with a history, not a set of records scattered across the business.

Fully autonomous agentic commerce may soon be reality, with Visa having launched its Agentic Ready programme across Asia Pacific, bringing more than 50 banking and fintech partners across ten markets together to prepare the region's payment rails for artificial intelligence (AI) agents that act on a shopper's behalf. Juniper Research further supports this, naming agentic commerce one of the biggest movers in consumer payments this year.

Shoppers across the region are already moving from asking AI for product suggestions to letting it browse and compare, and buying is beginning to follow. Retailers are treating this as an AI challenge, a question of which technology to deploy and how quickly, but it is fundamentally a customer engagement one. As agents take on more of the buying, that changes what earns a recommendation. The trust signals a brand creates through everyday interactions with customers could matter as much as price and product information.

We are anticipating the convergence of two key driving forces.

This involves shoppers having their own agents to browse and compare across brands, and how these agents are engaged upon contact with the retailer. Concurrently, retailers who earn the trust of those agents will be the ones who will attract and keep their customers, as buying moves into the hands of AI.

The shopper's agent is now the one deciding
Adoption is already underway. Visa’s State of Digital Commerce report found that 74% of consumers in Asia Pacific use AI to browse and discover products, though far fewer are yet willing to trust an agent with an actual purchase. For now, agents suggest whilst the person still decides.

That will not hold for long. Once shoppers let their agent make purchases, the agent compares brands with no inherent loyalty to any of them. Accenture's Talk to My AI Agent report found that more than a third of shoppers who consider themselves loyal to a brand would let their agent switch brands if it found a better fit.

Brand loyalty previously relied largely on friction unrelated to genuine preferences such as a saved card, a familiar app, and the effort of starting over somewhere new. An agent strips all of that away in a single step.

This points towards a landscape where AI-driven recommendations replace traditional loyalty. Retailers are no longer competing for attention on a shelf or homepage, but on the strength of the experience they consistently deliver. The experience is the signal that indicates whether an agent surfaces their brand or product to the shopper it represents.

Price is not the only thing that earns an agent's trust
Price will always matter, but an agent acting for someone weighs the whole experience, not just the number on the label, and increasingly that trust becomes measurable, expressed in the quality of a retailer's interactions with its customers.

How quickly it answers a question, how reliably it fulfills an order, how well it resolves a complaint and what reviews say, all become trust signals an agent can read. It is through these interactions, rather than the technology behind them, that a retailer proves that it can be relied upon.

A retailer with a consistently strong record on those signals is worth more to an agent than a small saving at a brand with a patchier one. Consistency compounds over time. Good outcomes give an agent reason to return, whilst negative experiences erode that record, usually tracing back to a business that treats customers as a stranger at every touch point.

How retailers can build trust in an agent-led market
Trust begins with knowing the customer as one person with a history, not a set of records scattered across different corners of the business. However, when that history is missing, the experience feels generic at the exact moment a shopper decides whether to let an agent act.

It also depends on carrying those same signals through one coherent relationship rather than a series of disconnected encounters. Whether a shopper arrives by WhatsApp, email, or through an app, they meet the same brand that already knows them. Above all, it is built into the handover itself, from an AI agent to a real person when a moment calls for it, so a shopper never has to explain themselves twice.

Together, these signals increasingly decide whether an agent recommends a retailer or quietly moves on. The retailers who get this right earn the standing of a trusted name that a shopper keeps returning to, not out of sentiment, but because they can be counted on to get it right.

The retailers who will win the agentic era
The winners in this next phase will not be those with the most capable AI, but those who earn trust on two fronts at once, the shopper who ultimately relies on the recommendation, and the agent acting on their behalf. Increasingly, both are won by the same thing, a consistent record of getting the experience right.

The retailers with the most connected and contextual customer experiences through integrating AI data, treating every interaction as a chance to prove they can be relied upon, are best placed to win over both. A retailer that feels unreliable will be quietly passed over, and may not even notice the customer is gone, because there is no abandoned basket or complaint to see, only an agent that passes on it.

This is being decided now, whilst a human is still in the loop shaping which brands their agent comes to rely on. The retailers building genuine trust into every interaction today are the ones setting the terms everyone else will have to meet.