MarTech: In agentic commerce, your brand promise must be provable

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. Read the full article here.

In agentic commerce, brand shifts from a perception advantage to a verifiable advantage. Customers may still choose brands based on emotion or identity, but their AI agents will evaluate those brands using measurable signals such as price transparency, fulfillment reliability, reviews, loyalty value, privacy practices, and service history.

This changes how loyalty is evaluated, and it means the first meaningful audience may be software acting with the customer’s authority.

Consumers are already delegating parts of the buying process to software. Nearly 70% of consumers and 73% of B2B buyers are using AI tools to evaluate purchases. At the same time, Bain predicts 25% of U.S. ecommerce, or between $300 billion and $500 billion, will be driven by agentic AI by 2030.

A brand needs to be machine-readable for agents while still resonating emotionally with consumers. While a consumer may have positive memories of past experiences or exposure to brand advertising, their agent needs to assess price, availability, reviews, return policies, loyalty value, delivery performance, privacy terms, and service history, with little consideration of the emotional components of the brand.

In five years, a brand’s ability to quantitatively back its brand promise will be more important than its most compelling advertising. 

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. Read the full article here.