Marketing to Humans and Machines

"The promise is simple enough. AI agents act on behalf of shoppers to search, compare, select, and even purchase products. These agents will use a shopper's preferences - stated and inferred - rather than browsing products from digital shelves. McKinsey & Company describes it this way: "Companies have spent decades refining consumer journeys, fine-tuning every click, scroll, and tap. But in the era of agentic commerce, the consumer no longer travels alone. Their digital proxies now navigate the commerce ecosystem.""

"In effect, this means ecommerce marketers have two targets: a human and a machine. It's a familiar scenario. Marketers seeking organic traffic have long sought shoppers and appeased machines, e.g., search engines. An online pet supply company wants Google to place its dripless water bowls at the top of search results and humans to click the listing. In much the same way, this retailer now wants an AI shopping agent to offer that dripless bowl when a consumer asks a genAI platform how to keep"

Agentic shopping enables AI agents to search, compare, select, and purchase products for shoppers using stated and inferred preferences rather than traditional browsing. Marketers must target both humans and machines, mirroring long-standing dual strategies like SEO that appeal to search engines and consumers. Commerce platforms and marketplaces will serve as primary conduits for shopping agents to access merchant catalogs, allowing merchants to publish structured product data once for broad distribution. Major platforms such as Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart are building or already functioning as discovery and agentic commerce infrastructure that facilitate agent-driven cart building and recommendations.

Read at Practical Ecommerce