Most "AI in commerce" stories are chatbots in a trench coat. Here are the five categories of agents we actually deploy that move the needle.
1. Merchandising agents Continuously rerank collections based on inventory, margin, and behavior. Replaces a category manager's daily work.
2. Support agents Resolve order status, returns, and product questions end-to-end — not just answer FAQs. Average resolution time drops 70%.
3. Ops triage agents Watch the order pipeline, flag exceptions, and auto-resolve common ones (address fixes, payment retries, split shipments).
4. Catalog enrichment agents Generate, translate, and QA product copy + attributes from your source data. Catalog launches drop from days to hours.
5. Experimentation agents Run continuous A/B tests on copy, layout, and offers. Promote winners automatically.
The pattern: agents that own a workflow end-to-end, not features bolted onto your existing tools.