Explore why intent is becoming the new competitive advantage as AI agents reshape the way customers discover and buy.
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The Joshua Problem: Why intent is everything in agentic commerce
In agentic commerce, the customer may not be the one making the decision. That changes everything.
You’re being asked what your agentic commerce strategy is.
You don’t have a clean answer yet. You’re not alone: most retail leaders we talk to don’t have one either.
The standards are still being written. The vendors haven’t agreed. And you’ve been here before: every time the industry shouted, “Integrate now or fall behind,” most early bets quietly went nowhere.
What you’ll learn
The agentic commerce argument, made boardroom-ready
What happens when your customers start delegating their shopping to AI; an AI that might never have heard of your brand?
- What an agent actually sees when it looks at your brand today, and why most retailers will be alarmed
- Whether your loyalty programme survives an agent acting on your customer’s behalf (most don’t)
- Who owns the customer relationship when an agent is in the middle
- ACP, UCP and MCP explained without jargon, with a clear view on what to back and when
- The five foundations every retailer needs to build now, whichever protocol wins
The Joshua Problem is the book for retail leaders who want to think this through clearly before they commit. By the time you’ve finished it, you’ll know what the protocol wars mean commercially, whether your loyalty programme is at risk, where your customer relationship is exposed, and how to defend your strategy when the board asks.
Retail Technology Strategy Advisor
, Equal Experts
About the author
Paul Sims, Retail Technology Strategy Advisor
Paul has spent more than 20 years inside retail – most recently as CTO at Halfords. Before that, he was chief architect at New Look, Primark, Marks & Spencer and Argos in Shanghai.
Some of our retail clients
The agentic commerce readiness workshop
Is your brand ready for the AI shopper? Agentic commerce is a thinking problem, not a tech problem — and most roadmaps skip the thinking. This 2-day workshop for retail leaders puts it first.
Over two facilitated days, your leadership team works through the real questions behind agentic commerce — who an agent actually serves, whether your brand is even legible to a machine, and where your revenue model is exposed.
At the centre is a live test: a real AI agent run against your brand, so the room can see what it finds, gets wrong, or can’t see at all. You move from “we should look at AI agents” to a plan you’ve agreed together.
You leave with decisions, not slides:
- Your top high-intent missions
- Your data gap — what an agent needs vs what you expose
- A brand legibility read — what a machine sees of you
- A 90-day and 12-month roadmap, with named owners