The "Western will win" framing skips the part where commerce agents have to integrate with SAP, Coupa, and Ariba before any of this matters at enterprise scale, and those rails are not exactly waiting on Silicon Valley. My procurement org runs eight-figure POs through workflows that need SOC 2 attestation on every party in the chain, which is a moat agents do not cross by being clever. Whoever ships the audit trail wins commerce, not whoever ships the slickest checkout.
What this doesn't say but implies: the actual skill gap now is 'knowing what to ask for.' That's not a skill schools teach.
western agents lose the second checkout requires a chinese supplier portal
Pricing pages are the new battlefield, and most of them still read like they were written for procurement teams in 2014. Watched a Shopify merchant lose three "agent-initiated" carts last week because their variant naming was ambiguous to anything that wasn't a human squinting at thumbnails.