Consumers are adopting generative AI for online shopping faster than ever.
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A recent report shows what might be the biggest shift in the history of consumer activity: AI is starting to take over shopping. Everything your business has done to build brand loyalty is at stake.
AI agents “can behave differently from human shoppers: they prioritize price, user ratings, delivery speed, and real-time inventory over brand familiarity or loyalty,” Boston Consulting Group reports. “This has the potential to reshape how retailers compete and how purchase decisions are made.”
There’s no time to waste in meeting this new reality. This year, 52% of consumers plan to use generative AI for online shopping, according to Adobe. Some will use it to simply get a list of options, and may pick their favorite brand from among them. But when they see those options listed together without brand identities or logos, price is even more likely to be the differentiator.
And soon, agentic AI will take on even more of the buying process. It’s like having “a personal shopper who deeply understands your preferences, lifestyle, and budget, effortlessly curating tailored product recommendations from thousands of options,” BCG says. “Your shopper seamlessly anticipates your needs, secures the best prices, and completes transactions autonomously.”
The way business works today, organizations will lose a lot through “disintermediation,” in which consumers bypass a brand’s e-commerce platform altogether, the report adds. “The growth of zero-click search and agent-driven interactions is eroding direct traffic—along with the retailer’s ability to observe, influence, and understand consumer behavior at scale.”
There are steps businesses can and must take now to prepare.
Your Own Agentic Experiences
The most important step is to create your own platforms that make consumers want to come directly to you. These platforms must offer all the same end-to-end shopping as third party AI applications like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
The good news is that your business has a big advantage in this battle: proprietary information about customers. By combining that information with the power of AI, you can provide experiences that make people want to shop there.
Building an agentic experience requires taking all the data you have about each individual customer and using it to personalize their journey, making them feel recognized and valued. That means leaving nothing on the table. Be sure to gather every piece of information from every interaction your brand has ever had with each customer, across any and all channels.
A well designed Unified Customer Experience Management (UCXM) platform can achieve this. It serves not only as a way to consolidate information, but also as a system for everyone across a company to collaborate. This way, people across different functions access the same records; update them in real time; and contribute to finding solutions to customer challenges.
Since these tools keep learning over time, they become more precise and successful, guiding each customer to their best possible experience. Everything about an agentic experience can be hyper-personalized, from an agent’s voice to its manner of speaking to the products and services it recommends.
Building a ‘moat’
“To drive revenue growth and improve ROI, business leaders may need to commit to transformative AI possibilities,” McKinsey says. “As the hype around AI subsides and the focus shifts to value, there is a heightened attention on practical applications that can create competitive moats.”
Your brand is like its own castle. The experience of going to it can be so enjoyable that customers keep visiting. And by ensuring that competitors can’t get in — that they’re unable to access your precious customer data — you keep the experience distinctive.
Of course, this is not the only part of the solution to the seismic shift ahead in how people shop. BCG notes that brands must also work to ensure discoverability on popular AI tools, through both “earned visibility” and paid opportunities.
On this, brands have an opportunity as well. Adobe found that when people arrive at a retailer’s site from a generative AI source, they are 10% more engaged, with 32% longer visits and a 27% lower bounce rate. “This indicates that with AI tools, shoppers are becoming more informed and focusing on the most relevant retailers during the research/consideration phase,” Adobe’s report said.
With a UCXM in place, your brand can know exactly how a customer arrived at your site each time, and use that to tailor their experience.
As with so many other revolutions, the AI revolution presents an opportunity. By developing new strategies, you can compete and win in new ways. The key is to see the possibility — not just the problem.
