Zac Brandenberg is Co-Founder and CEO of DRINKS, the end-to-end infrastructure for regulated digital commerce.
getty
I want you to try something. Go to ChatGPT right now and ask it to recommend a product in your category. See if your brand comes up. If it doesn't, you just watched your future customer walk past your store without knowing it was there. That's the new competitive landscape, and most brands have no idea they're already losing. Morgan Stanley estimates nearly half of online shoppers will hand purchasing decisions to AI agents by 2030. The question isn't whether this shift is coming. It's whether your brand survives it.
Every e-commerce playbook written in the past three decades assumes a person on the other end of the transaction: someone who notices your packaging, has a memory of a past order, maybe even follows you on Instagram.
AI shopping agents don't do any of that.
When someone tells ChatGPT to "find running shoes under $120, next-day shipping," the agent pulls price, inventory, delivery speed and review scores. It ranks options by fit, not feeling. Your brand name carries about as much weight as your font choice.
BCG's recent work on agentic commerce makes this explicit. Agents favor structured, verifiable signals over recognition or emotional pull. And in what the industry is calling zero-click commerce, the agent picks one winner and completes the purchase without the consumer ever seeing the alternatives. Your product might not even make it to the screen.
That's a fundamentally different problem than losing a customer to a competitor. You're losing them before they know you exist.
The companies that will hold on to customers in an agent-driven market are doing three things differently.
First, they're treating product data like a revenue-critical asset, not a catalog management task. AI agents can't evaluate what they can't read. Complete, accurate attributes like dimensions, materials, real-time stock and certifications are now the difference between showing up and being skipped. Gaps in your data feed are gaps in your revenue.
Second, they're shifting loyalty investment to post-purchase. When an agent handles discovery, the only part of the experience the human actually touches is what happens after they hit buy. Delivery speed, return simplicity, proactive communication. These are the inputs the agent learns from next time.
Third, a handful of forward-thinking retailers have launched their own branded agents that sit on proprietary customer data. Purchase history, loyalty tiers, preference signals—none of that is available to a third-party agent. The companies that control that intelligence layer keep the relationship. Everyone else becomes a fulfillment node.
Two years from now, the question every brand will face is blunt: Would an algorithm pick us?
Not based on reputation or on awareness, but on data quality, fulfillment reliability and what happens after the box arrives. Brand loyalty still exists, but it has to be earned twice now: once from the customer, and once from the machine shopping on their behalf.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。