Nico

AI Will Rewire Our Commercial DNA

November 22, 20254 minutes

How autonomous AI agents are transforming online shopping from an emotional experience into a purely logical transaction, and what it means for brand loyalty.

Enter Agentic Commerce

We’ve all been there. It starts with a simple search for a new pair of running shoes and ends, two hours and seventeen browser tabs later, with a cart full of not only shoes but also a moon-shaped lamp recommended by a “you might also like” algorithm. The modern online shopping experience is a mix of overwhelming choice, manufactured urgency, and the occasional happy accident of discovering a brand you now love.

The promised solution to this digital chaos is “agentic commerce”. An autonomous AI agent, your personal digital assistant, that handles the entire lifecycle of shopping for you with perfect, logical efficiency. But as we transition to a new world where artificial intelligence no longer merely helps but acts, we need to talk about the psychological fallout. The most disruptive aspect of agentic commerce isn’t the technology itself, but the fundamental alteration of the buyer’s mindset. These agents are not here just to help us shop, they are here to replace our human emotion and impulse with machine logic. And the brands that fail to adapt to this shift will simply become invisible.

The End of Emotional Loyalty

For decades, brand loyalty has been an emotional construct, built on heritage, aspirational storytelling, and identity. We used to stick with brands for irrational reasons. Maybe it was the nostalgia of that tiger on the Frosted Flakes box, or the way a specific pair of sneakers made you feel like an athlete. I could swear I ran faster with a new pair of Nike shoes. It was identity. It was emotional.

But an agent acts as a logical gatekeeper, immune to social and psychological levers that marketers have pulled for a century. It doesn’t have “happy memories” associated with a logo, nor does it care about your feelings. It operates on a completely different set of principles.

This doesn’t mean loyalty is extinct. It simply means it must now be expressed in a language a machine understands.

If a brand’s loyalty program offers tangible, calculated benefits like points, cash back, or discounts, an agent can factor those rewards into the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If the math works, you win. If it doesn’t, you’re gone. Loyalty is no longer a vibe. It’s just a variable in an equation.

If You’re Not in the Answer, You Don’t Exist

Forget SEO. The primary goal for brands is no longer to rank number one on a Google results page. Brands are now scrambling to figure out Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which is really just a fancy way of saying “make a brand’s information easily digestible for machines”. You have to get on the specific “Best Of” lists that the AI scrapes to form its worldview. Because if your product fails the agent’s logic check on price or specs, it vanishes. It never even touches the consumer’s screen.

And here is the dark side. Concerns are already mounting that platform-owned agents, like Amazon’s Rufus, could be programmed to favor their own label products or give preferential treatment to brands that pay for sponsored recommendations. This turns the agent from a helpful assistant into an opaque ad-delivery system, creating a new and significant challenge for antitrust regulators who must now audit algorithms, not just business practices.

The Price of Perfect Efficiency

This is the ultimate trade-off. Sure, we gain efficiency, but what might we lose in the process? While agents will deliver exactly what we ask for, the spontaneous discovery of new tastes, hobbies, and brands that defines today’s browsing experience may disappear. As we increasingly delegate our choices to code, we may find ourselves in a world that is perfectly optimized but profoundly uninteresting.

This raises a final, unsettling question: Will we eventually ask retailers to program “planned serendipity” back into our lives? Will we need algorithms to introduce randomness just to feel the thrill of discovery again? And if so, what does that say about the human experience we were so eager to optimize away?

References

AI Commerce Brand Loyalty Agentic AI E-commerce Consumer Behavior