Agentic commerce is here, and it’s about to turn retail economics upside down. Katherine Black of Kearney joined me to explain what’s coming and why most brands aren’t ready.
By Jeffrey Hayzlett
Let me be straight with you: retail is getting a wake-up call, and if you’re not paying attention, you’re going to get left behind. I’ve been saying for years that the most dangerous words in business are “we’ve always done it this way.” And right now, in retail, those words could be fatal.
I sat down with Katherine Black, Partner at Kearney, and she’s working with some of the biggest retailers and consumer brands on the planet. She’s helping them rethink growth, pricing, and relevance in a world where and here’s the part that should get your attention; machines are starting to shop for us.
You heard that right. AI agents are making purchasing decisions on behalf of your customers. And if you think your brand is still in control? Think again.
What is agentic commerce?
Katherine broke it down simply: agentic commerce is consumers shopping through agents. Think ChatGPT, Perplexity — you go in, research products, and increasingly, you’re going to transact right there, too. It’s already happening. It’s a small slice of total commerce today, sure less than 1% of measured retail sales. But between two-thirds and three-quarters of consumers say they’ve used these platforms to research purchases, or they plan to. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a seismic shift.
By some estimates, agentic commerce suggests it could handle 3 to 5 trillion in global transactions by 2030, according to a McKinsey report.
I pushed back a little. Isn’t this just search with a different hat on? Katherine set me straight. Unlike a search engine that spits out “here’s water” or “here’s a gel” based on what it was trained to serve you, an AI agent actually knows you. She trained for the New York City Marathon and asked it for hydration products. It didn’t just hand her a list; it asked where she was in her training plan, when she felt fatigued, whether she wanted natural or artificial ingredients. It came back with gels, water, and dates. Dates! The fruit. As a natural hydration source. I didn’t know that either. But the agent did.
The agent doesn’t just answer your question; it knows your context. Budget from last week, travel schedule, dietary preferences. Personalization is about to go on steroids.
So, who owns the customer now?
Here’s where it gets really interesting and; honestly, a little uncomfortable for anyone who’s built a business on owning that customer relationship. Retailers have had it good. They had the data. They had a direct line to the consumer. That was a massive asset they monetized every day.
That relationship is migrating into agentic platforms. The customer, and I say this as the former CMO at Kodak, was never really yours to begin with. I used to think those million-dollar printer customers were my customers. They weren’t. They were their own customers. We just got to serve them for a while. The brands that built loyalty on emotion alone, without real quantitative value? That equation is about to shift hard.
Katherine puts it plainly: loyalty gets you into the consideration set. It doesn’t guarantee the sale anymore. The agent is going to compare, contrast, and recommend, and if your product doesn’t win on facts, you’re out.
Who’s about to get disrupted the hardest?
I’ll tell you who’s in the Mack truck’s path: mid-size grocery and mass market retailers who don’t have a price advantage, a scale advantage, or a delivery advantage. Consumers are using agents right now to hunt for the cheapest replenishment items, household goods, groceries, everyday essentials. And they’re very comfortable letting an agent do that shopping for them.
The big guys, Amazon, Walmart, are building capabilities and have the scale to win that race. The mom-and-pop with great customer reviews? They might still show up, because these platforms pull from reviews and editorials, not just slick websites. But the ones in the middle, without the reviews or the price or the digital presence? They need to get moving.
And pricing itself is changing. It used to be that price was the strategy. Now it’s dynamic, AI-driven, and real-time. If you’re not the lowest price, you’d better have something else that’s undeniably compelling, and it had better be clearly labeled so the algorithm can find it. Organic. Non-toxic. Specific dietary needs. Whatever your differentiator is, it needs to be spelled out in black and white. The machine reads facts, not feelings.
The data problem most companies still haven’t solved
You know what Katherine told me that hit closest to home? Most companies still don’t actually use their data. They have it. They hoard it. But they don’t dig into it, they don’t build a culture around it, and they definitely don’t use it to serve the customer better. I lived this at Kodak. I used to joke that if you threatened to kill my children to get a customer list, you were going to kill my children because I could never get that data out of our systems.
AI amplifies whatever you already have. If your data is garbage; garbage in, garbage out. If you’ve got good data and you’re actually using it? You’re going to fly. Build the religion around it now, or you’re going to be running uphill trying to catch up.
What smart CEOs are doing right now
I asked Katherine for the one move every CEO needs to make in the next 12 months. She gave me three, and I’m going to pass them on to you.
First, get a real handle on who your customer is and how they’re going to shop you in the future. Not who you think they are, who they actually are, and which of your transactions are most at risk of migrating to an agent. Not every customer. Not every transaction. Know the difference.
Second, fix your discoverability. Get your data readable. Build a content strategy. Figure out what you can win on when the agent strips everything down to the facts. Create your canonical brand identity document; even a small business can do this without a massive tech budget.
Third, build defensive strategies to protect your basket profitability and bake loyalty into the algorithms. The brands that move now set the terms. The ones that wait are going to be scrambling to catch up.
The bottom line
We spent decades in retail talking about location, location, location. We built loyalty programs, invested in customer data, perfected our store layouts. All of that still matters. But right in the middle of everything now, right in the middle of how customers discover, research, compare, and buy is AI. And here’s what I noticed: look at the word “retail.” Right in the center of it? AI. That’s not an accident. That’s a signal.
The brands that figure out how to show up in this new world, how to be discoverable, how to win on facts not just feelings, how to earn trust in an algorithm-driven marketplace, those are the brands that are going to own the next decade of commerce.
The ones that don’t? They’re going to wonder what hit them.
Don’t let that be you.
Watch this timely “All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett” conversation on C-Suite TV and Spotify.
