The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said that agentic commerce could lead to personal shopping 'AI-gents' in the next five years.

In a new report, the public body explains that AI-powered agents will anticipate shopping needs and make proactive purchases based on learned and defined preferences or behaviours, along with knowledge of upcoming plans, rather than needing specific prompts.

The organisation said that this means the technology could soon "check personal bank accounts" to ensure a purchase is within monthly budget, assess how it will affect other spending plans, schedule purchases around seasonal sale events such as the January sales and even negotiate a price directly with sellers.

The ICO added that this could extend to agents seeking out tailored financing options to present to shoppers for agreement.

The ICO's executive director of regulatory risk and innovation William Malcom said that while the potential benefits of the technology could be "transformational", the public needs assurances that their personal information is secure and well managed before placing their trust in these systems.

“Strong data protection foundations can help build that public trust and can help scale the fast and safe adoption of AI," continued Malcom. "Throughout 2026 the ICO will actively monitor advancements and work with AI developers and deployers to ensure they are clear on what the law requires of them.”

The ICO's report is announced amidst a wave of developments in the technology, with retailers including Coach, Kate Spade, and URBN recently rolling out Stripe’s newly launched suite of agentic commerce solutions.

Last month, Visa also partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable developers and enterprises to deploy agentic AI commerce systems.

Through the partnership, the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform – which enables AI agents to make transactions on behalf of users – will be listed on AWS Marketplace.

Visa said that, as an example, users will be able to tell their AI agents to buy tickets if a price drops below a certain level.

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