How Agentic AI in E-Commerce May Transform the Brand-Customer Relationship

While artificial intelligence is infiltrating into e-commerce, agentic AI is the one area it's perhaps noticed the most. The pace of change on this front is almost too fast to keep up with. AI agents are being developed to assist in the buying journey and provide end-to-end solutions that can complete a purchase for customers.

However, as OpenAI, Perplexity, Amazon.com, and others race to the agentic AI forefront, one thing is clear: it will transform the brand-customer relationship just as e-commerce did — maybe even more — bringing with it a lot of unanswered questions.

Who is the Customer?

Let’s first look at AI agents that source products on behalf of the customer. In this instance, if I'm searching for a new jacket, I can enter my preferred style and other information into the agent, like ChatGPT, and see relevant results. The ability to refine these results through conversation can provide more relevant outputs, but it's still up to the shoppers to sort through it all. This experience is one step above a traditional Google search-to-website one, but it leaves the control in the shopper’s hands.

AI agents will soon have the ability to purchase products on shoppers’ behalf, assuming the product meets certain set criteria like size, color, and price. But in this instance, who does the retailer view as their customer — the person initiating the search or the AI agent actually making the purchase?

Because of this, brands may need to market their products to the agents themselves, providing the right product variables to be chosen as the winner. The customer journey may transform from focusing on the shopper to focusing on product pages and feeds filled with keywords and key phrases, customer reviews, price points, product variables, and better images. In this scenario, emotion will be replaced with nothing more than data.

What About Paid Ads and Discounts?

If the traditional journey changes, what happens to shopper retargeting? Right now, a shopper lands on a product page and continues browsing, leaves, or places items in their shopping cart. Well, AI agents presumably won’t be abandoning their shopping carts, nor will they be browsing websites. So instead of sending product or cart abandonment emails, SMS, and using paid retargeting ads, how will retailers capture shoppers’ attention?

Will agentic AI platforms find some way to allow retargeting, such as via email, that gets routed to the shopper? If so, the required customer interaction creates a close replica of the current shopping experience. What then is the real value?

Paid ads at the initial stage of search are also in the crosshairs. Ads are designed to get users to take an action, but what if there are no users? Brands that rely on search ads to drive sales may have a difficult time surviving. Even if users are searching for products themselves using AI tools, they presumably won’t encounter ads, meaning they will likely shop from whatever results are given by the AI platform.

This transactional nature of shopping may make the experience even more about price. If a product reaches a trigger price set by the consumer, retailers may feel the need to overly discount to capture sales. After all, retargeting emails and emotional marketing, such as a sense of urgency, may no longer be a viable option. Discounting becomes a major factor, impacting margins.

Oh, and here’s an outlier to ponder: If price becomes a major purchase factor, will we see the rise of counterfeit e-commerce sites selling intentionally cheap products designed to fool AI agents to capture sales and defraud customers? A lot of questions remain.

Brands Need to Prepare Now

As consumers begin their shopping experience using AI agents, there may be nothing more powerful or important than having them suggest a preferred brand. Instead of asking for the best green jacket, they may ask for the best green jacket among X, Y, and Z brands.

This scenario makes brand-building critically important, especially for smaller and less established ones. Focusing on creating an exceptional customer experience that gets people talking may be what’s needed to survive against the retail behemoths in the new era of e-commerce.

Agentic AI tools for e-commerce may have burst on the scene just a short time ago, but they’re moving quickly, bringing with them a transformational shift in the brand-consumer relationship. There are too many questions left unanswered, but retailers, especially smaller ones, need to take action now to insulate themselves for the impending shift.

Brands may not like it, but they do need to prepare for it.

Greg Zakowicz is a B2B and DTC marketing advisor with 20 years in email marketing and 13 years in MarTech.