Firmly Unlocks Access to Trillion-Dollar Agentic Commerce Revolution

LAS VEGAS, March 24, 2026 – As the retail world stands on the precipice of a seismic shift, Seattle-based Firmly today unveiled a platform designed to serve as the critical bridge to the future of online shopping. The company launched Firmly Connect, a first-of-its-kind agentic commerce platform that enables merchants to integrate with AI shopping agents and new marketing channels without deploying any code.

The announcement comes as analysts forecast the rise of a new economic force: agentic commerce. This emerging paradigm, where AI agents autonomously shop on behalf of consumers, is projected by industry leaders like McKinsey & Company to become a $3 to $5 trillion global economy by 2030. Until now, the immense technical complexity and prohibitive cost of connecting to this nascent ecosystem have kept most businesses on the sidelines. Firmly aims to change that, promising to make any merchant “agentic commerce-ready” in a matter of hours, not months.

The Dawn of the AI Shopper

Agentic commerce represents a fundamental evolution from traditional e-commerce. It moves beyond simple chatbots or recommendation algorithms to a world where intelligent, autonomous AI agents are empowered to execute the entire purchasing journey—from product discovery and price comparison to negotiation and final transaction. These agents act on a user's intent, translating a goal like “buy me a durable, waterproof tent for a weekend camping trip under $200” into a completed purchase across the web, often without further human intervention.

While the potential is enormous, the path for merchants has been fraught with obstacles. Integrating with even a single new AI-driven channel has traditionally been a monumental undertaking. According to industry data, these projects typically require three to twelve months of work, involve a dozen or more team members, and can cost anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 per channel. This has created a significant barrier to entry, leaving many retailers unable to participate in the next great wave of digital retail.

“Agentic commerce will represent one of the most important shifts we’ve seen in digital retail—opening up entirely new demand channels through AI agents, and emerging vertical shopping apps,” said Kevin Lenau, president of the Backcountry family of brands, an early adopter of the new platform.

A No-Code Bridge to the Future

Firmly Connect is engineered to dismantle these barriers. The platform offers a no-code onboarding experience that it claims can reduce a months-long integration process to approximately 45 minutes of a merchant’s time, slashing integration costs by an estimated 95%. By autonomously integrating with a merchant's existing website and commerce infrastructure, it eliminates the need for dedicated engineering teams and complex data restructuring.

Merchants like Best Buy and Backcountry are already using the platform to activate agentic commerce channels. The process involves verifying business credentials, selecting desired sales channels, and publishing their product catalog through the Firmly Agent Control Center. This centralized dashboard gives merchants granular control over which agents they sell through, which products are available in each channel, and how those products are presented and transacted upon. Crucially, merchants remain the merchant-of-record, allowing them to preserve their brand identity, direct customer relationships, and valuable first-party data.

“The challenge has always been how complex and resource-intensive it is to integrate any new individual channel,” Lenau continued. “With Firmly, that barrier disappeared. Backcountry and CSC can now easily connect their brands to these new channels, with zero engineering resources or reworking our infrastructure. I did not believe the zero engineering to launch but they proved this true.”

Underpinning the platform is a sophisticated architecture built on what Firmly calls “Protocol Abstraction.” This technology allows the platform to act as a universal translator, communicating with a fragmented landscape of emerging agentic protocols (such as MCP, AP2, and UCP) so merchants can connect once and distribute everywhere. This horizontal infrastructure layer operates above existing commerce platforms, offering universal compatibility.

“Agentic commerce is rapidly emerging as the next major distribution channel for online retail, but integration complexity has slowed adoption,” said Kumar Senthil, Co-Founder and CEO of Firmly. “We built Firmly Connect so merchants can become agentic-ready in hours, without writing a single line of code.”

Powering Payments for an Agent-Driven World

In a move that signals deepening integration with the core of retail operations, Firmly also announced a strategic partnership with Aurus, an enterprise omni-commerce payment platform serving major retailers and grocers in over 25 countries. Through this collaboration, Aurus becomes the first omni-commerce gateway to offer native agentic commerce capabilities.

This partnership is a significant accelerator for adoption among large-scale retailers. Aurus’s enterprise clients can now activate AI-driven sales channels directly through their existing payment infrastructure, bypassing the need for additional system overhauls. They can extend their product catalogs and checkout processes into new AI environments while maintaining their established payment orchestration and security systems.

Rahul Mutha, CEO at Aurus, highlighted the strategic advantages for his clients. “Through our partnership with Firmly, we’re able to deliver 3 things. First, we are able to keep all the existing digital commerce complex use cases and tender matrix intact. Second, we are able to bring the agentic commerce experience in matter of weeks not months. Third give the retailers a learning experience of Agentic commerce without reprioritizing other internal projects.”

This integration directly into the payment stack provides a frictionless on-ramp for established enterprises, allowing them to experiment with and scale their presence in the agentic economy without disrupting their core business operations. It demonstrates a critical maturation of the agentic ecosystem, where new sales channels are seamlessly connected to the trusted financial systems that power global commerce. As AI agents begin to handle transactions at scale, this foundational link between intent and payment will be paramount for building a secure and efficient market.