Why Agentic Commerce Will Supercharge Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Even with optimized e-commerce stacks, checkout remains fragile during high-traffic events. Commerce slows as order management systems process rapid inventory adjustments, sites deploy additional fraud checks, and thousands of customers pile into the same resource-intensive tax and shipping calculation flows. That latency continues to plague commerce that claims to be AI-based, and on high-impact shopping days, it’s a real problem. For shoppers, seconds matter: a limited-time discount or scarce product can vanish before the purchase completes.

To do better than an anxious shopper, agents need deterministic, low-latency resolution of the true landed cost (item price, shipping, and tax). Without this, AI-powered shopping collapses under the weight of its own promise, falling back on minutes-long human-in-the-loop backups or failing entirely. And there’s no worse time for that to happen than the holiday shopping rush, when retail comes under the tough lens of the national media. Bad shopping experiences can be a brand reputation nightmare for a retailer or, these days, an LLM.