Your next customer may buy from you without visiting your website, using your search bar, or seeing a product page. Their AI agent will research options, compare prices, check availability, apply loyalty benefits, and complete the purchase on their behalf.
By 2030, this AI-mediated shopping, known as agentic commerce, is expected to become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. Open commerce and agent payment protocols are making this possible by enabling AI agents to securely discover products, access enterprise systems, and complete transactions across the commerce ecosystem. But the real transformation isn’t just technological. It’s behavioral. Customers are moving beyond keywords and describing what they want to accomplish. AI agents understand that intent and act on it.
That changes how brands compete for visibility. As SEO evolves into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), success depends on whether AI can understand, compare, and recommend your products across third-party assistants and your own experiences.
The question is no longer whether AI can find your products, it’s whether your brand has a voice in the buying decision.
Download the e-book to learn how brand agents, structured product data, composable architecture, and built-in governance can help your business stay visible, trusted, and chosen in the agent economy.
Three ways brands will compete in the agent economy
AI agents are reshaping product discovery, redefining how brands compete for visibility and loyalty, and pushing retailers to build their own agentic experiences to stay in control of the customer journey.
Brand visibility, ownership and control
As AI shopping becomes mainstream, brands will pursue all three paths to compete in the agent economy, each offering a different level of control. Some will optimize their catalogs and content for AEO so third-party AI agents can discover and recommend their products. Others will build AI-powered shopping experiences on their own websites and apps. The leaders will go a step further by deploying branded AI agents that represent their business wherever customers shop. Understanding the tradeoffs between visibility, customer ownership, and transactional control will determine long-term competitive advantage.
An agent-ready composable foundation makes it possible
AI agents don’t browse websites the way people do. They interact directly with enterprise systems to check inventory, compare prices, apply promotions, redeem loyalty benefits, and complete purchases. To support those interactions, businesses need an agent-ready architecture that securely exposes pricing, inventory, checkout, and other business capabilities through APIs. That’s why open, composable, and connected architectures provide the foundation for the agent economy. They give AI agents trusted access to enterprise data and workflows while keeping your business in control.
Build trust into every AI interaction
As AI agents take on more of the shopping journey, they don’t just recommend products. They interpret customer intent, apply promotions, use loyalty benefits, and increasingly complete transactions on your brand’s behalf. Every AI interaction should be grounded in approved content, live enterprise data, and your business rules. Built-in guardrails and governance ensure AI represents your brand accurately, protects transactions, manages risk, and keeps your business in control.
What brand agents need to succeed
