Why brands need to court AI agents

In the next 24 months, your most valuable customer may never visit your site, click your ad, or read your email.

Imagine this scenario: You have a lake holiday coming up in two weeks. Instead of manually researching a new set of water skis, scrolling through reviews, and comparing prices, your AI agent handles this task. It scans your calendar to confirm the trip dates, checks the destination and expected conditions, then pulls data from your smartwatch to understand your height, weight, and skill level. It knows your brand affinities, your budget, your shipping constraints, and your preferred colors. Within seconds, it selects the perfect skis, ensures they’ll arrive in time, and purchases them—no endless open tabs, no second-guessing, no friction.

This isn’t sci-fi. It’s the next wave in digital commerce, and brands that don’t adopt now will fall off the digital shelf.

If your brand isn’t optimized for AI agents, it’s already losing. Think of AI agents as hyper-loyal personal shoppers but with perfect recall and zero patience for friction. Agents don’t care how beloved a brand is. They just care about the data.

The primary “shopper” your brand must persuade into purchasing will no longer be a person, but an AI agent acting on that person’s behalf. The traditional marketing funnel is irrelevant in a world where agents compress it into a single millisecond. These autonomous agentic AI systems ingest a customer’s preferences, constraints, and history, then compress the entire marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration to checkout, into a single, split-second decision.

If AI agents are the future of digital commerce, then the checkout process becomes even more critical. It’s one of the last, and sometimes only, moments where brands have permission to show up. That means relevance is what keeps you in the consideration set.

Most brands market to people. Those days will soon be gone as reasoning-capable agents are beginning to transact, not just inform. A vacation that once required hours of research can now be booked end-to-end in moments, with flights, hotels, and dinner reservations stitched together by code, not clicks. To thrive in this agent-first landscape, brands must reengineer how they surface, price, and prove value, because the algorithms will do the selecting long before a human ever sees the options. 

AI agents are a new distribution channel

SEO alone won’t cut it in the agentic world. AI agents aren’t browsing like humans; they’re retrieving, evaluating, and transacting based on clean, structured data. With 42% of U.S. businesses already paying for AI tools, the infrastructure to support agentic interaction is rapidly being normalized across enterprise stacks. On top of that, the consumer mindset is catching up with the infrastructure as ChatGPT is one of the fastest growing platforms of all time, reaching 100 million users in just two months. To remain in the consideration set, brands must optimize not just for discoverability but for the entire purchasing journey. That means building for machine experience the same way brands once built for user experience.

Agents will become distribution endpoints, not unlike marketplaces or search engines, except they’ll be personalized and always-on. Product information, pricing, and availability must be structured and accessible via APIs or structured feeds, not buried in formats or siloed systems that can’t be read by AI. Brands that view agent-friendly infrastructure as a key growth lever are poised to grab an outsize share of voice and revenue on what’s quickly becoming the new “algorithmic shelf.”

Loyalty from both humans and agents

Loyalty must be earned on two fronts: emotional and algorithmic. In a world where AI agents can ruthlessly parse thousands of SKUs in mere milliseconds, emotional storytelling may no longer get the job done. Agents will weigh product attributes against shipping timelines, historical pricing data, and ratings volatility with surgical precision. Subpar signals can cause a product option to be filtered out, no questions asked.

What does this mean for brands? More than anything, they must operationalize loyalty across two separate but equal fronts: one emotional, and one algorithmic.

For human shoppers, loyalty is still earned through rich brand experiences and tailored-to-you storytelling. Agents, on the other hand, demand a very different kind of digital courtship: high-quality, structured data, consistently reliable fulfillment, competitive pricing, seamless checkout with relevant upsells, and gold-star customer satisfaction signals. Brands that win both the hearts and algorithms won’t just lead; they’ll lock out the competition. For shoppers with only a tenuous connection to your brand, AI agents are your best shot at winning them over, if your data can back it up.

Advertising to agents

Marketing to machines doesn’t require charm, it demands cold structured truth. Unlike people, agents can’t be charmed or cajoled by creativity, only swayed by real-time relevance and quantifiable value. That forces a rethink of how brands allocate their media dollars. Traditional ad strategies that have been optimized for human psychology will need a parallel track for performance-driven, machine-readable messaging.

In this new paradigm, advertising becomes less about storytelling and more about signaling. These agents won’t merely browse, they’ll retrieve, rank, and decide. That’s why advertising must evolve to speak their language: real-time product availability, structured metadata, and machine-readable signals.

The agent economy is no longer speculative, it’s investable. To stay in the consideration set, brands must act now to build a data-first infrastructure, prove performance integrity, and become fluent in the language of machines. Agent-based advertising isn’t a futuristic niche; it’s the next frontier of performance marketing. It demands precision, agility, and real-time truth. Because in an agentic world, every brand is constantly reevaluated.

Relevance isn’t a campaign. It’s a living negotiation with algorithms in the driver’s seat.

Elizabeth Buchanan is chief commercial officer of Rokt.