Sunday, July 5, 2026

Does Rail Agentic Commerce needs an online account?

To create a truly personalised rail ecommerce booking experience for an individual just by using Agentic AI means providing customer specific information at different steps in the typical online retail rail process.

Let's consider the first step... an Origin & Destination journey search.
Probably initiated by a user prompt such as "buy a rail ticket from X to Y". 

This is fine if the customer wants to travel now, but not for travel tomorrow at 8am.
To start this search they need to say "buy a rail ticket from X to Y, to depart around 8am tomorrow".

And what about if the person has a Railcard (say an over 50s discount)?

Are they then going to ask
"buy a rail ticket from X to Y, to depart around 8am tomorrow using my Club50 Railcard"?

This is already getting quite combersome and we haven't even got to the complex stuff yet...

Would it not be much easier to just state "buy my usual train ticket for tomorrow morning"?
Based on the assumption that: 
1. They do actually have a history of bookings for the same origin & destination and around time of day to incur a peak fare product
2. The Railcard has been associated / linked with them.

But to do this requires the AI Agent to access their previous purchases (regardless of whether these were made by a human or an AI) and to see where & when these tickets were for. 

In other words, I can't see how you get more personalised Agentic Commerce unless AI access to a customer account is granted. 

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