2026 Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Digital Commerce
What’s Inside
Virto Commerce appears as a Sample Vendor in two profiles of this year’s Hype Cycle: Composable Commerce and API-Based Digital Commerce.
As you read, we suggest paying attention to the shifts that matter most for B2B and complex commerce operations:
✔ Agentic commerce moves to the center: AI checkout, agentic buying, and answer engine optimization (AEO) are the newest entries this year.
✔ Composable and modular commerce, evaluated pragmatically: flexibility weighed against total cost of ownership.
✔ API-based digital commerce as the standard for multichannel, agent-ready architecture.
✔ Product data as the discoverability layer for AI answers and machine buyers.
✔ Maturing, invest-now areas: enterprise marketplaces, distributed order management, and personalization.
See the full picture in Virto’s AI-powered features library.
Gartner Inc, Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2026. Sandy Shen, 2 June 2026
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Figure 1: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Virto Commerce.
