AI is no longer an emerging capability. It’s an operational requirement. Consumers are increasingly relying on AI agents such as ChatGPT and Gemini to discover, compare, and decide on purchases. The 2025 holiday season confirmed this shift, with AI and agents influencing 20% of all retail sales and driving $262 billion in revenue.
Today’s consumers are no longer just searching—they are agentic shopping. The brands that win are rethinking how their organizations operate with AI at the center. In this model,
AI is embedded into workflows, content systems, and decision-making, not bolted on as a tool.
Retail’s Big Show highlighted that the pace of change is no longer incremental. Below are 3 takeaways that brands should act on now to stay relevant in 2026 and beyond.
Consumers Are Ready for Agentic AI. Most Brands Are Not.
AI agents are increasingly shaping purchase decisions before consumers ever engage directly. Yet most brands are structurally unprepared. Their brand systems, including content, product information, and messaging, were built for human browsing and SEO rather than LLMs that interpret meaning and credibility.
As a result, a new optimization era is emerging. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the next push, with new tools such as LLM Optimizers from Salesforce and Adobe to help brands ensure AI agents recommend their products or services.
Now is the time for brands to double check their foundation. Is it built for these intelligent systems to navigate? Can AI represent who they are in addition to what they sell?
You Can’t Be Everywhere. Context Is the New Strategy.
Channel fragmentation has reached a breaking point, making omnipresence both inefficient and expensive. Brands are struggling to do it all, while measurement grows more complex and less unified.
A consistent message from the National Retail Federation (NRF): stop trying to win everywhere. Leading brands are choosing focus over fragmentation and designing for context instead of coverage.
Consumers are dynamic, whole humans who move fluidly through roles, moods, and moments. Brands that understand which moments truly matter to their customers and invest accordingly will outperform those chasing fragmented reach with diluted messaging.
AG1 is one brand that’s finding success by swapping static personas for whole human marketing. By leaning into what we call
Infinite Individualism™, the brand is delivering exactly what each person needs when they need it and scaling this approach across its customer base. The result is deeper, more meaningful interactions that go beyond feature or benefit-level content—or in AG1’s case, ingredients—and form a more complete view of each person and their unique context. Coupled with a highly targeted channel strategy, the brand is able to better engage consumers as whole people and meet them where and when they are most receptive.
When we see consumers as whole humans rather than data points, we realize that every purchase helps them achieve their health, wellness, and happiness goals.
Agentic AI enables brands to support those choices with clarity.
AI Has Delivered Efficiency. Experience Is the Opportunity.
Much of today’s AI investment is operational, and rightly so. Automation and optimization unlock immediate value and free teams for higher-impact work.
But consumers are ready for more. The next competitive advantage will come from AI-powered experiences that enhance human connection.
For retailers and brands, physical stores offer a prime opportunity to build credibility, emotional connection, and brand reassurance that digital alone can’t replicate.
This was a major theme at NRF and was echoed by brands including Under Armour, where the relationship between digital intelligence and physical presence is becoming inseparable. The brand’s recent partnership with Salesforce now powers the POS system in both stores and online, better syncing purchase and shopping behaviors for true personalization across channels. This also unleashes the power of AI Agents via Agentforce to further empower marketers at Under Armour.
The strongest retailers will connect AI-driven insight with human-led interaction, bridging data and empathy.
The Bottom Line
AI is changing how decisions are made, but human relevance still decides which brands stand apart from the competition. AI elevates our uniquely human abilities of emotional nuance and storytelling.
The brands that succeed next will not simply use AI. They will redesign their systems to scale trust, creativity, and growth.
The era of agentic shopping is here. Is your brand built to be discovered, or is it already invisible? Let’s build your AIgency blueprint today.
Get in touch to start the conversation.
