Strategy over urgency is right. So is the calendar.

Forrester published their State of Agentic Commerce framework yesterday.

Emily Pfeiffer's headline is "strategy over urgency." She is right. She is also describing a distinction that is harder to act on than it sounds.

The framework is accurate on the current state. Most agentic experiences are still conversational. True autonomy is rare. Consumer trust and adoption are uneven. Hype is running well ahead of behavior. All of that is true today.

The tension is in the timing.

Forrester's recommendation is to prepare now for the moment when agentic commerce becomes truly viable. That framing implies the moment is ahead of us. For some brands, it is. For others, the moment arrived this month.

Google's Universal Cart is rolling out this summer with Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta, Walmart, Wayfair, and a selection of Shopify merchants. Those are not pilot participants. That is the launch list. UCP is expanding to Canada, Australia, and the UK within months, and into hotel booking and food delivery shortly after. AP2 is shipping to Gemini Spark users this summer.

The infrastructure that makes a brand visible, selectable, and transactable inside those surfaces takes 12 to 18 months to build properly. Structured product data. Schema completeness. API-accessible checkout. Loyalty integration. Protocol compliance.

If a brand starts that infrastructure work when agentic commerce feels urgent, when their pipeline is shrinking, and their competitors are showing up in agent recommendations, they are 12 to 18 months behind a transition that is already in production.

Forrester is right that the answer is not panic. The answer is not waiting either. The brands on Google's Universal Cart launch list did not get there because they responded urgently to a summer 2026 announcement. They got there because they made infrastructure decisions in 2024 and 2025.

Strategy over urgency is the correct principle. The strategic decision is understanding that the infrastructure timeline and the urgency timeline are the same timeline. They just do not feel the same until one of them has already closed.

The Forrester framework is worth reading.