Agentic Commerce Does Not Have Legs Yet with Darin Lynch of Irish Titan
Darin Lynch founded Irish Titan and has been running it for twenty two years, which he credits to an industry that refuses to sit still. Scott Ohsman and I got him talking about what agentic commerce actually is, and he came with a framework rather than an opinion.
“There’s no way I could still be running Irish Titan 22 years after starting it if there weren’t a lot of change in the industry,” he says.
“I get bored too quickly,” he says.
The Question Agency Owners Are Getting
I put the uncomfortable question to him directly, which is what an agency is for now that merchants can build so much themselves. Darin did not argue with the premise.
“I do think that that is absolutely the reality. More merchants can do things on their own. Yeah. I think that’s great,” he says.
That answer follows from how he describes the firm’s purpose, borrowing Simon Sinek’s framing.
“And our whole, our why using Simon Sinek speak is business first, online second,” he says.
If the business comes first, a merchant doing more without him is a good outcome rather than a lost sale. What he thinks they still cannot absorb is everything else landing on them at once.
“They’re busy trying to navigate a goddamn nightmare on their own. Geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic headwinds, tariffs, their own employees, their investors, strategic positioning, supply chain, all of that. And then layer in, uh, AI, fight, flight, or freeze,” he says.
Which produces the line that is really his answer.
“I think the merchants have their hands full already and still need us,” he says.
Scott put the same point in agency terms, that when things get the messiest a client needs a value proposition most.
He has watched this cycle before. During the pandemic pull forward, agencies with no commerce background started building commerce sites.
“Then the prospect would come back six months later, a year later, my checkout screwed. Um, we have fraud problems. Can you fix it?” he says.
A Celtic Knot With Three Strands
Darin prefers agentic commerce to AI as a term for what is happening, on the grounds that it is specific enough to build a point of view around. Irish Titan’s has three parts.
“So we have three, we have three strands of our point of view around agentic commerce. It’s data enrichment, it’s discovery and it’s checkout,” he says.
He is unsentimental about how mature any of it is.
“It wasn’t invented a year ago, but started to take more root because it’s still really primordial,” he says.
“You know, it’s crawled out of the ocean and it’s maybe slithering around on the beach, but doesn’t have legs yet,” he says.
His evidence that the hard part is genuinely hard is the company with the most resources walking away from it.
“I mean, if open AI with all of their riches and all of their talent can jump into the deep end with checkout and then three months later, four months later say, you know what? Nevermind,” he says.
The value of having a framework at all, he says, is that it gives people something to hold when the alternative is freezing.
“I think having a, one of the things that’s comforting is it’s advanced enough that we can have a working framework,” he says.
Neanderthal, Ecosystem, Conversational
The most interesting thing Darin said was a model he was openly still drafting. He used to describe commerce in platform eras, monolith to SaaS, and he thinks that framing has stopped explaining anything.
“I think we went from this Neanderthal era to an ecosystem era to now a conversational era,” he says.
The first was expensive for everyone involved.
“And that Neanderthal era was a really heavy monolithic build that was difficult for all of us, difficult for the person on the site, difficult for the merchant trying to merchandise and manage promotions,” he says.
The second was easier to build on and still bent around search.
“Then we moved to this ecosystem era where it was easier for us on this side to build the solution, but it was still driven by traditional search engine results, best practices around how we could build a navigation and we had to train customers with that, right, with mega navs,” he says.
The third is where the buyer stops learning a navigation and asks a question instead.
“Now we’re in this conversational era where it’s more about how the customer might go to chat and ask their questions,” he says.
He was careful to label it unfinished.
“I’m not sure if that’s where I’m going to land on the errors, but that’s my workshop,” he says.
Where to Go Rogue
Irish Titan runs an annual event called Ecom Forum, and Darin mentioned a panel from a few years ago on going rogue, which predates the current sameness problem by a good while. The distinction he draws is about which parts of a site are yours to play with.
“Like you don’t want to mess around with the points of trust. Like you don’t want to mess around with checkout,” he says.
“But you should go rogue outside of that to create your own experience, your own brand and your own differentiation,” he says.
That concern runs straight into agentic checkout, and this is where Darin is least comfortable. His worry is not the technology, it is what a brand hands over. A heritage brand with decades of history routing its checkout through a third party assistant gets a faceless transaction and uncertain access to its own customer data.
“But I think that agentic commerce is still going to advance in a way where there’ll be the risk of that. Because if I’m a brand, I want to control my experience,” he says.
“Otherwise, why have I spent money investing in time, talent, treasure in building a brand?” he says.
Why Shopware
Darin has been vocal about Shopware since before it was obviously a good bet, and his reason is not the feature list.
“I think that one of the points of view that we have that motivates that is, at the end of the day, businesses do business with people,” he says.
He rates the platform on the complexity it will tolerate, which is what his clients bring him.
“We like the complexity that it provides. That’s where I’m going to put it. We like the sophistication that it provides for our merchants that need that. Restricted and regulated, for example,” he says.
And he rates the company on how it behaves when something is broken.
“We all live in the daylight. Bad news doesn’t get better with age, those sorts of things,” he says.
Asked for a last word on the brand, he offered a piece of collective-noun trivia instead. A school of fish, a flock of birds, and a pub of Titans.
The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report goes deeper on agentic commerce and on selling in regulated markets, with nine experts who advise B2B sellers. It was written and researched by Content Cucumber, presented by Shopware, and it is free at contentcucumber.com.