Source: Digiday
As AI agents make purchase decisions on behalf of consumers, brands are losing direct control over product discovery and selection to algorithmic systems that operate on opaque criteria—price, ratings, sustainability claims, or undisclosed weightings that marketers can't reverse-engineer or influence through traditional marketing levers. This disrupts the category management and shelf-space competition that defined retail economics for decades, forcing brands to either optimize for machine-readable signals (and risk commoditization) or build direct relationships with consumers before the agent even enters the decision loop. The stakes aren't conversion rates; they're whether brands become visible at all in a filtered, agent-mediated marketplace.