Agentic commerce is really starting to take off, with options like Amazon’s Rufus and ChatGPT’s Instant Checkouts making a splash among consumers. Examples include buying from within ChatGPT or setting auto-buys on Amazon when products reach a certain price point. How will this change things for businesses?
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- To put things in perspective, it comes down to potential customers who are using the agentic A.I., so at the end of the day the A.I. is there to help the consumer make a purchasing decision.
- The goal for a business owner is to increase the odds that agentic A.I. helps direct customers to the business’ products and/or services. Accurate pricing, product descriptions, and availability will matter here, as will customer reviews.
- An upside is that agentic A.I. can do a lot of searching very quickly for users. So it may surface your website and products for potential customers who may not otherwise have found your business through search.
- A downside could be conversational agentic A.I. such as Amazon’s Rufus or ChatGPT, which now has Instant Checkout inside it, talking a customer out of purchasing from your business. That will be the alternative to the old way of the customers browsing your website and looking through your products on their own.
- Agentic A.I. will upend the e-commerce landscape by allowing for greater convenience for customers. What’s more, agentic A.I. will demand that businesses try to capture the attention of A.I. agents shopping and searching on behalf of customers.
The Significance for Business Owners
E-commerce has become essential for so many businesses in the 21st century.
Many businesses have hit a groove at this point thanks to S.E.O., social-media marketing, and other dependable practices.
But A.I. adds another element in the mix, which is that it lets customers do less searching and browsing on their own. Instead, these customers will be reviewing a personalized curation of products or services that A.I. browsed for in searches of its own.
What’s more, in some cases the customer will not even need to visit the product page. If the customer takes the A.I.’s word for it, the customer can just have A.I. buy the product, website unseen by the customer.
Where Businesses Stand to Benefit
The nice thing about this is that it can lead to quicker purchases, and perhaps even more.
If agentic A.I. makes it easier to make purchases, then people may indeed make more purchases just because of how easy it becomes.
The convenience factor is not something that businesses should underestimate.
Yes, people may be spending less time on your website because of agentic commerce, but you may seeing less almost-purchases from human website visitors and more purchases by A.I. agents saving humans the trip to the website.
Taking the big-picture view here can be helpful, then, in seeing that there is plenty or perhaps even more opportunity to make online sales.
What will matter here is how business owners will adapt.
One Way to Adapt to Agentic Commerce
A.I.O. (artificial-intelligence optimization) is the key thing to focus on with agentic commerce.
What will A.I. be searching for? All this and more:
- Accurate prices that compare well with other businesses
- Product availability
- Competitive shipping times and rates
- High-quality images of the product
- Straightforward and clear product descriptions
Hopefully you already have all these things, but the key here is to have these taken care of because generative A.I. makes it possible for agentic-commerce A.I. agents to create personalized carousels of different products to quickly survey.
In that case, customers will be quickly brought to where many online shopping experiences end up, which is the product-comparison stage. Making sure that the information is available to make the carousel cut, and further to stand out on that list, will be paramount.
Potential Negatives that Businesses Must Brace for
The other side of the coin though is that there will be less opportunities to make a strong branding impression.
There may even be some cases where the brand impression is so weak that the customer can’t even remember the name of the company the product was bought from, only the price of the product that the A.I. relayed to the customer.
In this e-commerce landscape, it could be more difficult to gain repeat or loyal customers, unless those customers really like the product and come back. That makes a good argument for creating great products that customers will want more of.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Business owners should consider the implications of a digital-shopping environment with less human eyes on their company’s website and more time spent with A.I. agents that are summarizing, ranking, and relaying key details about businesses’ products.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
GO Deeper on Substack!
If you want to get a bigger-picture view on where A.I. is and is headed, then check out our Substack to learn about emerging and dominant themes in the A.I. industry that affect all kinds of businesses!
