Remember the emergence of e-commerce in the 1990s? Keep an eye on the horizon for agentic commerce, says Carol Juel, executive vice president and CEO of Synchrony Financial’s Digital Platform.
Agentic commerce, powered by AI-driven shopping assistants, involves the use chatbots to compare product prices, features, availability, convenience, and loyalty programs to recommend which item to buy. It then takes care of the payment and delivery process as well.
And there’s a lot at stake with the coming of agentic commerce. AI shopping agents are expected to handle approximately $1 trillion in U.S. revenue by 2030, according to a report by McKinsey & Co. Meanwhile, Bain & Company estimates AI agents may handle upwards of 25% of U.S. e-commerce sales by 2030. This shift isn’t lost on Google and Walmart, which in January struck an agentic commerce partnership.
Synchrony, with $15 billion in 2025 revenues, operates the online Synchrony Bank, and manages credit card and lending programs for retailers like Lowe’s and Amazon.
The company, which was part of General Electric until about a decade ago, been busy with agentic commerce partners like Mastercard, Visa, and Google. With these partnerships, Synchrony is developing and testing agentic commerce solutions to help shoppers find and complete AI-assisted purchases, identify financing options, and ensure that AI shopping agents understand financing, rewards, and payment options. In addition, Synchrony also built its own shopping agent for its marketplace shopping site to learn first-hand how agent-driven purchases can shape loyalty, financing decisions, and personalized shopping experiences.
Juel recently spoke to InnoLead about Synchrony’s agentic commerce efforts and what’s needed to push consumer adoption.
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How would you describe the current landscape for agentic commerce, and what goals does Synchrony have for this emerging form of commerce?
Carol Juel: We are at this precipice of a shift from e-commerce or digital commerce to agentic commerce.
What this means is consumers will be discovering products or services through large language models and chatbots, so payments and financing transactions will not happen the traditional way they do today. It’ll happen through these big AI players, so it’s really important for a company like Synchrony, with our partners, to make sure we are future-ready to enable agentic commerce.
For example, you use a big AI company chatbot to find a size 8 pair of sneakers under a certain dollar amount. When you’re taken to that actual item, you’ll be able to do the agentic transaction with the same chatbot without having to pop out to a different website or go into an app. That will be a big shift in how commerce happens, and things are changing rapidly.
…When you move into agentic commerce, how do we make sure those foundational things that make commerce work are embedded into this new ecosystem?
…Although consumers today feel comfortable transacting a certain way, when you move into agentic commerce, how do we make sure those foundational things that make commerce work are embedded into this new ecosystem? There’s trust, identity, and ensuring what happens today around loyalty, promotions, and any number of things about the value of a card program and transaction will materialize in the new ecosystem. All of these considerations are a big part of where we’ve been spending our time, because you want to make sure consumers’ expectations that they will receive full value of a particular type of payment program exist in this new agentic commerce world.
When did Synchrony first learn of agentic commerce, and what steps did you take to get support to drill down further into this?
Juel: We began to see the idea of agentic commerce rise in 2024, and said, “This is really interesting.” We could see the preponderance of large language models, data, and how quickly chatbots were becoming mainstream. We wondered how this would become part of the commerce ecosystem, and could see in different areas where smaller AI companies were starting to dabble in this. We took an incubation team and started to look at this idea and ask questions like: What is happening in the industry, what does it mean for our partners, what does it mean for our business, how do we test and lean into this, and what is currently out there.
So, we did a proof-of-concept and a pilot in late 2024 into early 2025 within the Synchrony Marketplace, which allowed us to have an agentic commerce experience within our own marketplace. We did the pilot to learn and understand how consumers would behave, what the A/B testing would look like, and how we would think about this project. We then had the data to say, there is an opportunity here with consumers engaging within our own walls in a smaller environment, and we can see a trend and a need to make this a bigger strategic project for the company.
When you have something of this size and scale, number one, you have to have the right level of support. …You need the right leadership sponsorship across the company and assurances that the team is empowered to move quickly. Our incubation teams are empowered to scale and be agile, so they can work through things very quickly and have the skills in order to adapt and respond to the market.
Agentic commerce today is still in its early days or early innings… We are testing and learning with proofs-of-concept, and understanding consumer behavior.
Where Do Your Agentic Commerce Efforts Currently Stand?
Juel: They’re not ready for prime time yet. Agentic commerce today is still in its early days or early innings.
Currently, we are testing and learning with proofs-of-concept and understanding consumer behavior, but we’re not at the big launch phase yet. We have a big piece that we’re not quite sure when it will come that’s tied to consumer adoption, but we’re confident it eventually will. I think consumer adoption is at an intersection point where this could really take off, but it’s difficult to put a date to that…
What have been the biggest challenges you have faced with your agentic commerce efforts?
Juel: …Today, there’s a ton of trust in the payments ecosystem in terms of how consumers transact. When you’re moving to an entirely new ecosystem using agentic commerce through large language models, you have to make sure consumers feel the same trust and confidence, and that it feels secure.
As a result, collaboration among all the players working to define the standards and protocols to enable commerce using generative AI is the biggest opportunity because…if not done well, you don’t have the trust of the consumer. And without trust, it’s going to be hard to drive adoption.
It sounds like really simple stuff, but when you think about it, it’s a whole new ecosystem, and so ensuring the same controls and privacy and security and interoperability exists in the new ecosystem that existed with the payment rails that have been around for…and working with new entrants and new players, and ensuring everyone understands consumer expectations of how payments should work in this new agentic world, is a very large opportunity.
What has been the most important thing Synchrony has done to set it on its path for agentic commerce?
Juel: I think there’s one key component that helped. Synchrony has had an AI strategy for the past 10 years, working on many different pieces of AI. When generative AI came onto the scene more than three years ago, we had a process in place to leverage AI. We saw it as a unique opportunity to really understand what it could mean for our business and our industry. This thinking was in place even before agentic commerce came along.
We focused on how to create AI readiness for our employees. Building AI fluency into jobs was something we feel very strongly about, and we know it’s going to change the nature of work and many things. AI fluency can help lead these types of changes in commerce with our partners, so we’ve had a huge focus on ensuring employees have relevant training, are using AI tools, and understand the power of them, as well as what they mean not just for their jobs but for our partners.
Today, we have 90 percent of our exempt employees using AI tools every day. Also, 82 percent of our employees believe AI will create new growth opportunities for Synchrony, and 80 percent of those folks also believe it will have a positive impact on their career. The culture we built around AI in the early days can unlock power in our employees, and the idea of agentic commerce doesn’t feel like a bridge too far to cross.
…Consumers will be able to discover, purchase, transact, and resolve their online shopping all through large language models.
If you pull out your crystal ball, where will agentic commerce be in five years?
Juel: I think five years from now, consumers will be able to discover, purchase, transact, and resolve their online shopping all through large language models. It may not be done with a chatbot anymore, but it will open up the opportunity for more consumer choice, fully embedded payment experiences with full value propositions in terms of loyalty points, rewards, and promotions, and then servicing the customer in a way that allows them to get something resolved almost instantaneously.
…If we could paint the future, transactions are going agentic. I don’t know why not.
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