Scalable Intent: Handling a million simultaneous AI purchases

Black Friday used to be the ultimate stress test. But even the biggest human crowds obey the laws of physics—they sleep, they click at human speeds (approx 1 action per 2 seconds), and they get distracted.

Machine Swarms are different. Imagine a scenario where a popular shopping assistant AI identifies your product as the "best value" option. Within seconds, ten thousand instances of that agent might attempt to verify stock and purchase simultaneously. This isn't just traffic; it's a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack... of money.

This is Scalable Intent. It is the new watermark for high-performance commerce.

The Thundering Herd Problem

Legacy e-commerce platforms are built on sessions. They allocate memory and resources for every "visitor," expecting them to linger. This works for humans. It collapses under agents.

Agents do not need "sessions" in the traditional sense. They need stateless, idempotent transactions. They hit your API with the full intent to buy already formed.

Architecture for the Swarm

To handle this, we need an architecture that resembles High Frequency Trading (HFT) more than a web shop. We must move the "Buy Button" to the Edge.

Pillars of High-Scale Agentic Commerce

Conclusion

Scale is no longer just about handling more humans. It is about surviving the speed of machines. In the agentic economy, performance is product. If your API times out, the agent moves to the next supplier in the vector space.