Agentic AI: from showing to doing

Agentic AI shifts the interaction from showing information to executing delegated actions: once users can ask, they increasingly expect the system to act. Generalist use has not yet reached the maturity needed for people to delegate complete actions, but the direction of expectations is already visible.

2026 captures the current phase: infrastructure accelerates, trust lags behind. Google launched background search agents and agentic checkout inside AI Mode, and presented at the NRF in January 2026, together with Shopify, an open standard for agent commerce — Universal Commerce Protocol, with Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart among the co-developers and over twenty supporting entities including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and American Express; in May it was extended with universal cart, deferred payment, and new markets. On the opposite front, OpenAI scaled back native checkout in ChatGPT after five-six months (see Trust, AI literacy and calibration). The direction is traced; adoption will depend more on the design of trust than on technology — and, in Europe, on the regulatory framework (see The regulatory perimeter).