Your Loyalty and Agentic Commerce Programs Are Running Independently, and the Divide is Growing

Retailers have spent decades (and billions of dollars) building loyalty ecosystems designed to understand their customers, personalize experiences, and give people a reason to come back. But now, just as those programs are becoming more sophisticated, something new is inserting itself between retailers and their customers: artificial intelligence.

Consumers are using AI assistants to discover products, compare alternatives, and decide what to buy. As a result, they're often making purchases directly, without ever visiting a retailer’s website or launching its app. That raises an uncomfortable question for retailers: What happens to loyalty when the customer becomes more loyal to the AI agent than the retailer?

This represents a seismic shift in consumer behavior, and most retailers aren't prepared to address the implications of AI-first shopping. Historically, loyalty has been owned by marketing and customer engagement teams. Agentic commerce, on the other hand, is typically being driven by e-commerce, digital, data, or technology teams.

While both sides are investing, innovating and creating value, they're doing so independently. The lack of alignment between these teams — working off different data, with different budgets, road maps, and key performance indicators — produces dissonance between two capabilities that should be inseparable.

Agentic Commerce is a New Channel

Fixing this requires recognizing that agentic commerce isn't simply another feature to add to a website or mobile app. Rather, it's an entirely new sales channel.

A parallel can be drawn with early e-commerce before retailers eventually realized they needed dedicated strategies for product data, pricing, inventory, fulfillment, marketing, and measurement. AI-mediated commerce will require the same level of thinking.

However, this time there's one major difference: the retailer may not control the interface. An AI agent can compare products across dozens of retailers based on price, availability, delivery speed, reviews, and what it knows about the customer. However, these agents will lack critical proprietary data about customers, such as their rewards balance, access to free shipping or other perks. All of these factors could easily influence decision-making but get left out of broad AI queries. Suddenly, decades of investment in loyalty can disappear at the exact moment it's supposed to matter most. To address this, retailers need to assess if their loyalty programs are “agent ready.”

Loyalty Must Become Machine-Readable

Retails should begin by enabling access to loyalty benefits to authorized AI agents in a manner that is both secure and permissioned. Retailers should develop services and APIs that allow an agent, with the customer's consent, to understand loyalty status, available rewards, personalized offers, member pricing, and other eligible benefits during product discovery and checkout.

For example, let’s say an AI agent finds the same $100 product at two retailers. Retailer A offers it for $95 while Retailer B charges $100. At first glance, the decision seems obvious.

However, things get more complicated if the customer has $15 in rewards at Retailer B, receives free expedited shipping, and will earn additional loyalty credit from the purchase. With these benefits, the $5 price difference is less of a factor and Retailer B may actually offer the better value for that specific customer. But if the agent can't access that information, it can't make the best decision for the customer.

Loyalty needs to be integrated into the agent's decision context, not something the retailer tries to apply after the decision has already been made.

Building a Two-Way Loyalty Bridge

Granting access to the necessary information is not a simple one-way integration. Retailers need a consent-based mechanism for transactions initiated through AI agents to flow back into their loyalty ecosystems.

If I buy something through an AI assistant, that transaction should still offer all the benefits I receive directly from the retailer itself, be that in loyalty points and rewards or even something as simple as an updated purchase history which better reflects my preferences the next time I log in. Otherwise, retailers face a much bigger long-term problem because as more shopping migrates to third-party AI interfaces, their understanding of their own customers could actually get worse.

To prevent this, retailers must drive the build of two-way loyalty bridges where information flows outward. This will allow the agent to understand the full value of buying from that retailer while at the same time transaction and behavioral information flow back so the retailer can continue recognizing and serving that customer.

Retailers Will Have to Compete for Agent Recommendations

Retailers spent decades competing for customer attention. More recently, they competed for store traffic, then search rankings, then website traffic, app engagement, and most recently placement on marketplaces. Now they may increasingly have to compete for agent recommendations. If an AI agent is deciding where a customer should purchase a product, price will only be one part of that equation.

Exclusive products, member pricing, rewards balances, experiential benefits, superior return policies, early access, subscriptions, free delivery, and other loyalty benefits can all give the agent a reason to recommend one retailer over another. That expands the way retailers think about loyalty.

The question is no longer, "How do we keep customers coming back to our channels?" It also needs to become, "How do we make our brand the best choice wherever the customer's agent happens to be shopping?"

Protect the Relationship, Not the Interface

Moving forward, retailers cannot assume customers begin their shopping journey on a retailer's website or app. Trying to force them to may ultimately be the wrong strategy.

Instead, the objective should be to preserve the customer relationship, even when the interface changes. That means loyalty, e-commerce, technology, marketing, and data teams cannot continue solving this independently.

Retailers need governance shared across departments. They need a unified customer identity and consent model. They need machine-readable product, pricing, inventory, and promotional information. And they need loyalty capabilities that can operate beyond the channels the retailer owns directly.

Retailers that succeed will make their loyalty ecosystems portable: rewards will follow customers, benefits will stay visible, purchases will be recognized, and relationships will continue to deepen — even when the transaction happens through another interface.

Ultimately, retailers shouldn't be trying to protect the interface; they should be trying to protect the relationship instead.

Retailers spent the last 20 years optimizing loyalty for customers who came to them. The next era of loyalty will be defined by whether those same benefits can follow customers wherever, and however, they choose to shop.

Greg Serrago is global head of retail transformation, UST, a global AI and technology transformation solutions company.