Mumbai, India, 26th February — After a year of rapid AI adoption and rising digital complexity, ecommerce growth in 2025 exposed a critical reality: increased budgets and more tools did not automatically translate into better outcomes. According to Netcore’s Agentic Commerce Shift Report 2026, the brands that pulled ahead were those that fixed execution, not those that spent more.
The newly released report examines how leading ecommerce teams are re-architecting growth by shifting away from campaign-led, channel-first models toward agentic, always-on execution systems designed around profit outcomes.
Drawing on real-world performance patterns from large retailers and digital-first brands, the report identifies six execution shifts that are reshaping ecommerce growth heading into 2026. These shifts focus on how brands capture high-intent signals, orchestrate journeys in real time, and deploy AI agents with shared context and clear ownership.
“2025 didn’t slow ecommerce; it exposed the limits of old growth models. Funnels multiplied, journeys expanded, and AI scaled, but conversion often didn’t follow. The gap wasn’t intelligence. It was execution,” the report highlighted.
One of the report’s central findings is the redefinition of discovery itself. Rather than treating discovery as a top-of-funnel activity, high-performing teams are increasingly managing it as a sales function, ensuring that intent signals translate into action through intelligent follow-up, not static campaigns.
The report also highlights a shift toward always-on journeys as the default operating model. Instead of episodic campaigns, ecommerce leaders are designing continuous, agent-driven journeys that adapt dynamically to customer behaviour, timing, and context.
Another key insight is the emergence of mission-led planning. Rather than starting with channels or formats, leading teams plan around missions such as clearing inventory, improving conversion quality, or increasing lifetime value, then select channels as execution layers.
The Agentic Commerce Shift Report 2026 identifies six structural shifts that explain why ecommerce performance is diverging sharply between leaders and laggards, including Walmart, Restaurant Equippers and Fabindia. Together, they point to a fundamental reset in how digital commerce systems are designed, governed, and measured.
While AI adoption accelerated sharply in 2025, the report stresses that outcomes improve only when AI agents operate on shared context with clear ownership tied to profit metrics. Brands that treated agents as isolated tools saw limited gains; those that embedded them into execution workflows unlocked measurable results.
Across multiple use cases, teams applying these execution shifts reported outcomes such as faster revenue acceleration, stronger conversion lift, and improved ROI often without increasing media spend.
Unlike trend-heavy or speculative reports, The Agentic Commerce Shift Report 2026 is grounded in execution patterns already in play. It reflects what ecommerce teams learned the hard way in 2025 and how those lessons are shaping operating models for the year ahead.
The report is intended for ecommerce CXOs, growth leaders, and digital teams seeking practical guidance on how to adapt to an environment where AI agents, not campaigns, increasingly drive outcomes.
