Zero-click commerce: AI agents set to intermediate $15 trillion in B2B purchases by 2028

A Gartner forecast cited by commercetools places a striking number at the center of B2B commerce's near-term future: AI agents will intermediate $15 trillion in business purchases by 2028, accelerating a shift in which buyers may complete entire procurement cycles without ever clicking through to a vendor's website.

The mechanics of agentic commerce

Agentic commerce refers to AI systems that act autonomously on a buyer's behalf — sourcing suppliers, evaluating options, and executing transactions without step-by-step human direction. The practical consequence for B2B sellers is that the traditional digital storefront, long treated as the center of a commercial strategy, risks being bypassed entirely.

In this model, an AI agent working for a procurement team at a manufacturing firm, for example, could identify, compare, and order industrial components from a supplier it deems optimal — all without a human buyer navigating the supplier's website or initiating a manual search. The vendor that wins that order is the one whose product data, pricing structures, and credibility signals are legible to the agent.

This dynamic gives rise to what analysts are calling zero-click commerce — a category-level disruption in which the click, historically the atomic unit of digital retail measurement, ceases to be the defining event in a purchase journey.

Answer Engine Optimization moves from fringe to priority

As AI agents increasingly mediate purchasing decisions, the channel through which buyers discover vendors shifts from search engines to answer engines — AI systems that synthesize information and surface recommendations rather than returning a list of links. Commercetools identifies Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, as an essential discipline for B2B sellers operating in this environment.

AEO requires sellers to structure product data, content, and technical documentation so that AI systems can accurately interpret and recommend their offerings inside automated decision flows. This differs meaningfully from conventional search engine optimization, which is designed to attract and persuade human readers scanning a results page.

For B2B organizations that have spent years refining SEO playbooks, keyword strategies, and conversion-rate optimization for human visitors, the AEO pivot represents a significant operational and strategic reorientation. Content that ranks well in a browser search may carry little weight with an AI agent evaluating a procurement shortlist.

Scale of disruption signals urgency for B2B technology stacks

The $15 trillion figure from Gartner, as reported by commercetools, underscores that agentic commerce is not a speculative retail experiment — it is a near-term structural shift in how business-to-business transactions are initiated and completed at scale. The timeline to 2028 gives organizations roughly three years to adapt commerce infrastructure, data architecture, and go-to-market approaches accordingly.

For commerce platform providers, systems integrators, and B2B technology buyers, the implication is that platforms must be capable of exposing product catalogs, pricing, and inventory data in formats that AI agents can consume programmatically. APIs, structured data standards, and machine-readable product information become competitive differentiators rather than back-office technical requirements.

Retailers and distributors that serve both consumer and business segments face compounded pressure: zero-click dynamics are reshaping consumer commerce simultaneously, meaning that investments in agentic readiness may need to address both buyer populations at once.

What sellers should act on now

Commerce operators looking to position for the agentic shift should focus on the quality and machine-readability of their product data first — inaccurate or incomplete catalog information will cause AI agents to deprioritize or misrepresent offerings. Structured data, standardized taxonomies, and clean API surfaces are foundational prerequisites.

Building an AEO strategy in parallel with existing SEO programs allows organizations to maintain current traffic while developing the capabilities needed to appear in AI-driven recommendation flows. The two disciplines overlap in their emphasis on authoritative, accurate content — but diverge sharply in how that content is formatted and distributed.

As Gartner's projection makes clear, the organizations that treat agentic commerce as a future concern rather than a present investment risk ceding significant purchasing volume to competitors whose infrastructure is already legible to the AI agents making tomorrow's B2B decisions.