InMobi’s agentic commerce vision promises trillion-dollar economic shifts but raises transparency and ethical concerns

InMobi Group CEO Naveen Tewari unveils plans to embed agentic AI systems in commerce that could transform consumer behaviour and add trillions to India’s economy, while highlighting the need for transparency amid regulatory scrutiny.

Agentic commerce could reshape how people buy goods while creating major economic shifts, but only if systems are built with transparency and accountability, InMobi Group founder and chief executive Naveen Tewari warned at the AI Impa...

“If you bring AI intelligence into commerce, you fundamentally shift economic growth. But this must be authentic. Digital platforms over the past decade have created distortion. Social media has often manipulated attention. Agentic systems must be transparent and accountable,” Tewari said, outlining both the promise and the risks of embedding generative intelligence into shopping experiences.

Tewari argued that when AI becomes part of the commerce stack it will alter consumer behaviour, supply chains and manufacturer planning, enabling retailers to move from broadly personalised feeds to what he described as “personal feeds” created for individual users in real time. “What you would see here is personal feeds of consumers getting created in real time with products on them,” he said, adding that InMobi plans to train commerce models at scale to bring such intelligence to large numbers of shoppers.

To deliver that vision, Tewari described an architecture built from multiple models, anchored by a “commerce intelligence graph” that maps products, preferences and commerce relationships, and layered with generative capabilities tuned for shopping use cases. He also highlighted a “living commerce context graph” intended to capture a person’s momentary context, intent and sensitivities around price and brand, which can be fed into models to determine efficient purchase pathways. “You can actually put that into the model, and it’ll find out the pathway for the most efficient buying for you,” he said, describing purchase-path optimisation capable of evaluating “millions and billions” of possible routes.

Tewari and company statements framed the shift as economically large-scale. According to coverage of his remarks, he suggested agentic commerce could contribute as much as $3 trillion to India’s economy by 2047.

Glance, the consumer-facing arm of InMobi that is central to this strategy, has drawn substantial backing as it pursues AI-driven content and commerce. The company counts Google and Mithril Capital among earlier investors and secured a reported $200 million investment from Jio Platforms in 2022; business accounts differ on recent valuations and funding totals, with one company update citing $390 million raised at a $1.7 billion valuation and other reporting placing a $2 billion valuation at the time of the Jio deal. InMobi Group remains a major shareholder, holding roughly half of Glance, and the parent has said it has invested about $200 million into Glance AI and a generative AI advertising stack.

Glance has deepened technical ties with Google Cloud to add generative AI features to its apps, leveraging technologies such as Gemini AI and Imagen, and has explored distribution partnerships with Reliance Retail and device-level placements like JioPhone Next to broaden reach across India and into markets including the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Russia, according to company announcements and prior reporting.

Industry observers caution that the commercialisation of agentic systems will raise regulatory and ethical questions. Tewari himself flagged the risk of attention distortion from digital platforms over the past decade, and policymakers and consumer advocates have already begun pressing for clearer rules around algorithmic transparency, data use and automated decision-making in commerce. Third-party analysts note that systems optimising purchases at scale could concentrate market power if product discovery and recommendation pathways are controlled by a few large platforms.

For now, InMobi and Glance are pursuing an approach that blends large-scale model training, contextual graphs and generative interfaces to steer users toward optimised purchase options. The company says that combination will not only personalise offers but also streamline supply-chain responses and manufacturer planning. Whether those benefits materialise equitably, and how accountability and transparency will be enforced, remain central questions as agentic commerce moves from prototype to wider deployment.

Source: Noah Wire Services