Your Next Customer May Be An AI Agent. Here’s How To Win It Over.

Person interacting with Agentic AI interface on laptop, featuring chatbot, analytics, shopping cart, and user icons, representing artificial intelligence in modern digital business platforms.

getty

Would you buy from a brand you’ve never heard of because a friend recommended it? Most of us would at least consider it. Now imagine that recommendation comes not from a friend, but from an AI agent shopping on your behalf — one that has already compared prices, checked reviews, verified availability, and made the call before you ever opened the app.

According to Accenture’s latest Consumer Pulse Research, consumers are further ahead than most companies realize. More than three in four of consumers say they would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase for them — a striking sign of how quickly AI trust is maturing.

AI’s growing role in buying decisions

Consumer comfort with AI-assisted shopping is growing fast — but the degree of control people are willing to hand over still varies considerably. Today, 74% of consumers are open to agents handling commerce tasks like negotiating deals or resolving complaints, and 32% are willing to let an AI agent make the final purchasing decision on their behalf (with payment still confirmed by the consumer), within defined boundaries such as price and preference. One in 10 (9%) are even open to fully autonomous purchasing within set boundaries – for example, letting an agent manage a weekly grocery order from start to finish, from product selection, to purchase and even doorstep delivery.

What people are willing to delegate depends on the stakes. Low-friction decisions — price comparisons, deal negotiations, complaint resolutions — are easy to hand off. High-stakes choices shaped by personal values, such as whether a product is ethically made or sustainably sourced, are harder to relinquish. Payment remains the clearest boundary: consumers are far more comfortable ceding control before checkout than at it.

Brand loyalty takes on new meaning

Brand loyalty is being quietly renegotiated. It is no longer a reliable, repeated choice — it is conditional, context-dependent, and increasingly mediated by algorithms. While more than half of consumers instruct AI which brands they prefer, preference alone is no guarantee of purchase. More than a third of behaviorally loyal consumers — those who typically stick to one or two preferred brands in a category — would let an AI agent override that loyalty for a better deal, a closer match, or a more available option. The implication is significant: historical loyalty is no longer a reliable moat.

For decades, brands earned loyalty through familiarity, emotional resonance, and memorable storytelling. Those assets still matter — but they are table stakes now, not differentiators. When an AI evaluates which brand to recommend, it weighs signals that are harder to fake: accurate product data, competitive pricing, reliable fulfillment, and verified reviews. A brand that tells a great story but can’t back it up with structured, machine-readable evidence may simply not make the shortlist.

The path forward

The rules of brand competition are being rewritten. Storytelling still shapes consumer preference, but performance now determines which brands AI agents actually choose. To stay competitive as this shift accelerates, retailers and brands need to get three things right:

1. Become the consumer’s preferred brand, as well as the AI agent’s default. Being beloved by shoppers is no longer sufficient on its own. Brands must also show up in forms that AI agents can evaluate and act on. That might mean building a branded AI concierge — Adobe research finds that 43% of consumers would engage with a brand’s AI concierge if one were available. For others, the priority is simpler: make it easier for third-party agents to access clean, reliable product data, real-time pricing, and fulfillment details.
2. Build brand connection and prove you can deliver. As AI takes over more routine purchasing, direct brand-to-consumer touchpoints will become rarer — but more consequential. Every interaction needs to earn its place. For retailers, this means surfacing the right product at the right moment and working closely with brand partners so that what’s on offer genuinely matches what consumers need.
3. Stay present, even as the consumer journey gets mediated. The consumer journey increasingly begins before the consumer is even involved — an AI agent may have already narrowed the options by the time a human weighs in. Brands need to compete at that earlier stage. Building agentic engine optimization (AEO) capabilities alongside search engine optimization (SEO) ensures visibility at every decision point, including the ones happening without any human present.

The most important buyer in the room may soon not be human. As AI agents take on more of the shopping journey, brands face a new dual mandate: win the trust of consumers and the confidence of the algorithms acting on their behalf. The brands that figure out how to do both — staying emotionally compelling to people while remaining structurally legible to machines — will be the ones that endure.