Retailers Need Agency Partners Ready for Agentic AI

Retail’s agentic commerce moment is already underway. Payment processors keep rolling out partnerships and integrations that open the door for nonhuman buyers. It’s the next step in a natural progression of artificial intelligence shaping shoppers’ decisions about what to buy. IBM reports that 41 percent of consumers already use AI to research products, 33 percent to find reviews, and 31 percent to seek deals and promotions. Bain & Company predicts agentic commerce will have a 15 percent to 25 percent share of U.S. e-commerce by 2030.

Retail brands rely on agency partners to buy the media, produce the creative, run the campaigns that reach those shoppers in real time, and make adjustments accordingly. Can those partners keep up?

AI Digital Labs’ AI Maturity Report shows most agencies can’t. Two-thirds remain stuck in pilot programs that never graduate into full operations, and nearly 84 percent can’t tell a client what makes their AI approach different from a competitor’s down the street. In most cases, it comes down to the time available, as 51.8 percent of agencies say day-to-day work consistently pushes AI initiatives down the priority list.

Retail brands grapple with a similar challenge on their side of the relationship. A Deloitte survey of retail and CPG executives found 75 percent call AI a top strategic priority, but only 16.5 percent can quantify a return on it. Both sides say AI matters, but neither has yet fully proven that it pays off.

Traditional agency work is priced and staffed by the hour — how many people, how much time, and how many rounds of revision. Agentic AI breaks that model. When a system can plan a campaign, adjust spend in real time, generate creative variants, and report on performance with minimal hands-on direction, staff size becomes less relevant. What matters is what the agency’s systems can actually do without someone manually steering every step.

That changes what “more” looks like, too. When the cost of producing a creative variant drops, brands ask for more of it. In practice, that means an agency generating and testing dozens of headline and image combinations across paid social in a single week, not a single round of revisions per quarter. It means reallocating spend between channels within hours of a campaign underperforming, not at the next scheduled review. If agencies treat agentic AI only as a cost-cutting tool, agentic retail clients will pass them by.

Retailers should ask their agency partners two direct questions right now: Can your systems adjust media spend in real time as a shopping journey compresses from days to minutes? And when a campaign underperforms, does someone notice it on Monday or does the system catch it within the hour? A demonstrated example of creative variants tested and iterated at that pace matters more than a description of the capability in a pitch deck.

Most agencies can’t answer both yet, and retail brands can’t afford to wait and see which ones catch up.

David Mainiero is the chief AI officer at AI Digital, an AI-native media consultancy.