Retailgentic: Agentic Commerce meets Retail and Brands

Matt Nichols Returns: What 2025 Got Right (and Wrong) About Agentic Commerce

Dec 18, 2025

Matt Nichols, General Partner at Commerce Ventures, returns to discuss the rapid evolution of agentic commerce and its impact on retail and fintech. He highlights the swift realization of predictions made just six months ago, stressing the ongoing infrastructure challenges that hinder frictionless transactions. The conversation tackles the disparity between standards like ACP and practical implementation, the shift from static to AI-centric feeds, and predictions for 2026 involving traffic spikes and wallet battles. Prepare for insightful takes on what brands must prioritize today!

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Standards Aren't The Hard Part

Standards like ACP matter less than the infrastructure retailers need to implement them.
Connecting every merchant into agentic commerce plumbing is the hard, unsolved problem.

ADVICE

Add AI Magic To Your Site

Bring AI-driven experiences to your own site to keep customers from leaving to ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Prioritize keeping users on-site before worrying about full agentic transactions.

INSIGHT

Feeds Need To Be Rich And Contextual

AI-centric feeds must be far richer than legacy shopping feeds and include novel contextual data.
More product data points and proprietary signals give agents better recommendation confidence.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Matt Nichols is back, and a lot has changed since his first appearance on Retailgentic. Scot and Matt revisit the predictions he made six months ago, look at what came true far faster than expected, and dig into the infrastructure challenges that still stand between us and frictionless agentic transactions. From SKU mapping and API-first checkout to the economics of feeds and the future of retailer traffic, this episode is a full-stack view of where Agentic Commerce stands at the end of 2025, and what’s coming in 2026.

If you want more of Matt’s backstory and Commerce Ventures’ thesis, listen to Episode 4! It pairs perfectly with this deep dive. In this episode, they cover:

Why VC predictions used to take 5–10 years to play out… and now take 5–10 weeks
What Commerce Ventures is hearing from both startups and their LP base (top retailers + PSPs)
Why ACP isn’t “the solution”—and what infrastructure still needs to be built
The “API vs. fake-it-til-you-make-it” debate in agentic transactions
How retailers should think about feeds, reviews, and blocking scrapers
Why “AI magic on your own site” is step one for most brands
Predictions for 2026: traffic shifts, wallet battles, Apple’s eventual entry, and more
Where Matt thinks the industry is overly optimistic, and where the real upside is

If this year taught us anything, it’s that the next six months will change more than the last six years. Stay tuned.

Timestamps
05:00 — Welcome back, Matt Nichols
05:10 — Six months later, the world looks different
05:35 — Commerce Ventures in 60 seconds
06:30 — What changed in 2025?
08:00 — Standards vs. infrastructure
10:00 — Retailers’ three priorities right now
12:40 — Static feeds → AI-centric feeds
15:00 — Reviews, Q&A, and proprietary data
17:30 — SKU-level identifiers
20:00 — API-first checkout vs. agentic scraping
22:30 — Fraud, agent authentication & whitelisting
24:00 — Payments are further ahead than commerce infrastructure
27:00 — What retailers are actually worried about
30:00 — Google’s role in accelerating the shift
32:00 — Vertical agents vs. horizontal giants
34:00 — Predictions for 2026 & beyond
38:00 — Final reflections

👉 Connect with Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewnichols/
👉 Learn more about Commerce Ventures: https://commerce.vc/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc: https://retailgentic.transistor.fm