CMOs Prepare for 'Agentic Shift' in Commerce
Brand marketers are beginning to navigate an “agentic shift,” where AI agents will increasingly act as autonomous gatekeepers, filtering and recommending products to consumers. This new landscape requires CMOs to design for discovery by AI, not just by humans. The focus is on ensuring a brand’s key differentiators are encoded in the data and logic that AI systems use to make their selections.
- The "agentic shift" moves commerce from an interface-driven model, where consumers browse and click, to an intent-driven one where they state a goal and an AI agent handles discovery, comparison, and execution. Experts predict that by the end of 2026, many consumers may bypass brand websites for routine purchases, relying on agents for direct transactions. - Major tech companies like Google, OpenAI, and Amazon are becoming "AI Gatekeepers," controlling the AI agents that determine which brands have algorithmic visibility. For instance, OpenAI's Operator, integrated into ChatGPT, automates tasks like travel and restaurant reservations and allows users to complete purchases within the chat using an Agentic Commerce Protocol co-developed with Stripe. - A study simulating e-commerce found that an AI agent's product selection rate increased fivefold when an item was moved from the bottom-right corner to the top row, indicating that page position significantly impacts AI choice. The same study noted that while agents respond positively to high ratings and more reviews, "Sponsored" tags actually decreased the likelihood of selection. - To prepare for this shift, brands are focusing on a new practice called AI Agent Optimization (AAO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This involves structuring product data and brand messaging to be easily discoverable and understandable by AI, focusing on signals of authority and credibility from sources like wikis, earned media, and academic domains. - Companies are already launching their own branded AI agents. Firms that have implemented them have seen a 59% higher year-over-year sales growth compared to those who haven't (6.2% vs 3.9%). - The grocery sector is seeing the fastest consumer adoption of AI-assisted shopping, with 70% of shoppers having used AI tools for tasks like saving money, saving time, or comparing products. - This new landscape requires a shift in marketing strategy from focusing on human-readable web pages to creating machine-readable data. CMOs are being tasked with redesigning marketing operating models to integrate AI and humans, with 81% of marketing leaders now also accountable for the digital customer experience. - The challenge for brands is to encode their unique voice and values into AI to avoid generic, commoditized interactions. This involves training AI on curated brand examples and establishing clear guidelines to ensure the AI's outputs align with the brand's persona, turning rigid rules into flexible, context-aware tools.
