Brands have spent decades influencing shoppers. Now, they may need to influence the AI agents helping them shop.

Commerce strategy has always been centered on how to reach and influence consumers. Now, there's another barrier on the way to a transaction. What happens when the person shopping for your product isn’t the one making the purchase?

Meta’s Muse is an AI-powered personal shopping agent that helps consumers source and purchase products. Walmart is now opening its retail infrastructure up to agent-driven interactions through Agent Gateway. Together, these developments signal a significant shift in the future of commerce. AI is moving beyond helping consumers discover products and toward serving as shopper proxies — evaluating options, recommending products, and potentially completing purchases on a consumer’s behalf.

Commerce has long since moved beyond a retailer's digital shelf, but the emergence of agentic shopping makes for a fundamental reordering of the shopper journey. Traditional media plans may need to give way to newfangled tactics as brands consider how their investments influence both human and agent-mediated shopper decisions.

As with any maiden voyage along the digital frontier, questions are bound to arise. MiQ can help brands tackle concerns like:

• Where can brands continue to create demand when an agent joins the purchasing decision?
• How should investments across channels and measurement keep pace as these environments become increasingly disconnected?
• How do brands build preference when an AI agent, rather than the consumer, is evaluating the options?

MiQ Sigma’s Commerce Intelligence offers an omnichannel, platform-agnostic solution to these challenges. By connecting watching, browsing, and buying signals, it provides a comprehensive view of the shopper, helping brands understand how media influences AI-driven purchasing decisions and identify opportunities to grow market share. As the connection between ad exposure and purchase becomes harder to trace, Commerce Intelligence helps brands pinpoint where media can influence outcomes and measure its impact.

Even with AI pushing the proverbial shopping cart, brands still need to give consumers a reason to choose them. The brands that understand how to create demand before the search begins, build preference among humans and agents alike, and drive incremental growth will be best positioned for this next phase of commerce. Especially if they’re partnered with MiQ.