The Physical Store as a Real-Time Agent Service Node

Abstract

The rapid growth of agentic commerce, in which autonomous artificial intelligence agents execute retail transactions on behalf of human consumers, is creating a structural demand that physical retail stores are not architecturally prepared to meet. This paper's primary objective is to define an architectural framework that transforms physical retail stores into real-time agent service nodes capable of responding to machine-initiated inventory and fulfillment queries with the low latency and high reliability that agent-driven transactions require. The research design combines an architectural analysis of current radio-frequency identification (RFID) deployment patterns in retail store operations with a proposed reference architecture, the Store Inventory Service, that unifies four infrastructure capabilities behind a single application programming interface (API) layer: item-level RFID accuracy, location-aware inventory mapping, fulfillment channel routing intelligence, and real-time store capacity signaling. The methodology further introduces a Store Readiness Assessment Framework across five operational dimensions, providing retailers a diagnostic model for evaluating the gap between current store technology states and an agent-ready target state, with a measured metric, maturity levels and thresholds for each dimension. A prototype exercised against 250,000 simulated agent queries cuts false promises from 6.48% to zero and p95 latency from 1,079 ms to 53 ms against a cycle-count baseline. The main outcomes identify that achieving reliable agent-query responses requires high aggregate inventory accuracy, fine-grained item-location resolution, low-latency API response times suitable for machine-speed transaction flows, and a graceful degradation strategy for handling RFID infrastructure disruptions without excluding the store entirely from agent-directed fulfillment routing. The paper concludes that the physical store's competitive position in an agent-mediated commerce landscape depends directly on its ability to expose real-time, machine-readable inventory and fulfillment state through a well-designed API architecture, and that industry-wide interoperability standards will be necessary to prevent agent commerce readiness from becoming disproportionately concentrated among the largest, best-resourced retailers.