A private roundtable at The Cube Madrid, where MIOTI Tech & Business School brought together senior corporate and startup leaders to discuss the channels reshaping online commerce.
MIOTI Tech & Business School, The Cube Madrid, February 2026
Networking before the session at The Cube, MIOTI’s innovation hub in Madrid.
AI agents that research, compare and buy on behalf of the customer.
Where marketing budgets move next, beyond marketplaces and social.
How top brands and startups are preparing their teams for the shift.
MIOTI Tech & Business School invited a small group of corporate and startup leaders to The Cube in Madrid, the innovation hub where MIOTI is based alongside companies such as Uber. The session was private by design: no cameras, no public agenda, just an open conversation between people building and buying technology at scale.
The conversation centered on agentic commerce: what happens to marketing, checkout and customer relationships once AI agents start researching, comparing and buying on behalf of the customer. We talked through what this means for product feeds, for loyalty programs, and for channels brands have spent a decade optimizing for humans, not algorithms.
The industry is already moving. Google’s early 2026 push toward agentic commerce combines a Universal Commerce Protocol, meant to let AI agents and retailer systems speak the same language across discovery, purchase and post-purchase, with checkout tests directly inside AI Mode and Gemini, and a Business Agent that can answer product questions straight from Search. None of this replaces the website. It changes what the website is for.
The catalogue is doing more work too. A product feed is turning into something closer to a decision engine: FAQs, compatibility, accessories and substitutes all become signals an agent needs before it can justify a recommendation. A complete, well-structured catalogue is no longer just a performance lever. In an agentic environment, it can be the difference between being part of the conversation and being left out of it entirely.
The next commerce channel might not have a human on the other end. Brands that only optimize for people scrolling will miss the agents transacting. But then again, where is the fun in that future?
Victor de la Fuente
For fifteen years my work has focused on where eCommerce strategy meets emerging channels, from marketplaces to voice and now to agents. Sessions like this one matter because the shift is still being defined. The brands in the room get to help shape it instead of reacting to it later.
Speaking and lecturing at top Spain universities, business schools and international events.
Here is where I push back a little on the hype. Agentic commerce solves a real friction problem, but its core value proposition is not particularly entertaining. Social commerce works because scrolling, discovering and buying on impulse is fun in itself. Asking an agent to compare four blenders and check out is efficient, but efficiency alone has never been the reason people spend time on a platform. If agentic commerce wants adoption beyond quick replenishment purchases, it needs to compete on engagement, not just convenience.
The bigger unsolved problem, in my view, is integration. Getting a third-party LLM platform to search a catalogue and complete a clean, standard purchase is the easy part. The hard part is stitching that same agent into the rest of the customer journey inside the business itself: support after the sale, order changes, exchanges, and every non-standard issue that does not fit a tidy product schema. Most businesses have not built that layer yet, and until they do, agentic commerce will handle the simple slice of purchases well while the messy remainder still falls back on a human.
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