This year’s Black Friday gave retailers’ security teams a preview of their new reality. Surges in traffic on peak shopping days is nothing new, but the nature of this traffic is changing dramatically, in ways that traditional defences aren’t cut out to handle.
The rise of agentic commerce, where consumers use AI agents to browse and buy on their behalf, is reshaping user behaviour. At the same time, malicious actors are using the same technologies to automate fraud and exploitation at an unprecedented scale. As a result, authentic customers, legitimate agents and hostile automation are becoming increasingly difficult for security teams to tell apart.
To make matters worse, the rise of agentic commerce comes at a time when UK retail infrastructure is already under pressure, with Harrods, Marks & Spencer, and Co-op all subjected to large-scale hacks earlier this year. The lesson is clear: retailers must now manage routine traffic peaks while also defending against increasingly sophisticated automated digital threats.
Agentic commerce as the new norm
Analysts expect AI shopping agents to influence significant portions of global consumer spending by the end of the decade, and new offerings like Google’s Agentic Checkout tool are already gaining popularity. These tools won’t just operate within retailer-owned interfaces. They will live within browsers, mobile operating systems and messaging platforms, and will routinely crawl multiple merchants on behalf of a single customer.
The challenge is that even the harmless AI agents used by customers often look like bad bots. And conversely, even an authenticated, seemingly ‘legitimate’ agent can still behave destructively: monitoring a retailer’s pricing API every 15 minutes, adding hundreds of items to carts and abandoning them, booking and cancelling inventory at machine scale, or probing every endpoint of a retailer’s to optimise a transaction. None of this looks like ‘fraud’ as security teams have come to know it, but at scale, this behaviour destroys analytics and distorts demand signals – which can cause far-reaching damage to operations.
A new toolkit for security teams
Historically, security teams have been focused on classifying users – or to put it simply, identifying ‘what’s bot, and what’s not’. This binary approach doesn’t work in an environment where both legitimate and malicious agents are capable of executing full-browser flows, honouring rate limits and mimicking the tempo of human browsing. The most sophisticated bots today behave exactly like a retailer’s ideal customer. They fill baskets, review product attributes, vary their navigation patterns and, when necessary, slow themselves to evade detection.
To take full advantage of the opportunities agentic commerce offers, retailers need full visibility and control over every automated interaction, whether it’s initiated by a human, an AI assistant, or an autonomous agent acting independently. That starts with internal policy: mapping where AI agents are being used, defining clear access boundaries, and ensuring any agent-to-agent interaction takes place under strict governance.
Traditional approaches that focus purely on identity or traffic signatures are not enough. Agentic AI behaves dynamically: it reasons, navigates flows, and interacts with sensitive endpoints in ways that can look extremely human. This is why businesses increasingly need real-time, multi-layered detection that evaluates not just behaviour but intent. It’s no longer enough to answer the question of ‘bot or not’ – security teams need to be asking why the bot is there in the first place: is it performing a legitimate task, probing for weaknesses, scraping content, or attempting fraud?
Takeaways for 2026
The goal is for retailers to be able to manage agentic commerce with confidence and take advantage of the huge slice of revenue agentic commerce is expected to bring. Customers will continue to embrace agentic AI in the browsing and buying journey – especially on peak shopping days like Black Friday, where AI agents can help shoppers scope out the best deals and snap them up before other customers.
Retailers that invest in securing their machine-to-machine infrastructure, adopt verifiable agent identities, and focus on intent-led detection will get the best of both worlds – staying secure while capitalising on the opportunities agentic commerce will bring.
Jérôme Segura is the VP of Threat Research at DataDome
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