By Jason Knight, chief strategy officer at Luckybeard
The way consumers discover and shop is undergoing a major shift, and it’s happening faster than many retailers realise.
Visa unveiling of its AI-powered commerce platform, and OpenAI’s integration of Shopify into ChatGPT signal the rise of autonomous shopping, a world where consumers don’t browse websites or type into search bars – they talk. And increasingly, they’re talking to AI.
This shift moves the moment of brand discovery away from curated homepages and paid ads, and into the hands of conversational agents. In this new world, the first time a customer “meets” your brand may be through a chatbot’s recommendation, not your carefully crafted storefront. According to a recent Accenture study, 72% of consumers frequently use generative AI in their purchase decisions – a clear sign that the way people find and choose brands is changing radically.
That changes everything for retail marketers. Your next big customer touchpoint might be a single, AI-generated line of dialogue. And that raises an urgent question: What does your brand look like to a machine?
The storefront is now a chat window
The homepage has long been the centrepiece of retail’s digital strategy. For years, a brand’s website was a consumer’s first impression – a carefully designed entry point where visuals, messaging, and seamless UX worked to turn browsers into buyers. But, as AI-powered tools reshape how consumers discover and choose, that entry point is shifting.
Increasingly, the first interaction a customer has with your brand won’t be through your website homepage, it will happen via a chat window. Whether a user is asking ChatGPT for product recommendations or is browsing with an AI-powered assistant, discovery is now dialogue-based. And your brand needs to be ready to show up – accurately and consistently. Discovery is no longer something that brands can fully control, but rather AI is taking charge through scanning product feeds, reviews, and availability to determine which results to show. In fact, 58% of consumers now turn to generative AI tools for product recommendations, which is more than doubling from just 25% in 2023, signalling a clear departure from traditional search engines as the default starting point.
Traditional marketing tactics like SEO or advertising are no longer enough. To win in this new AI-dominated space, brands must become machine-readable and recommendation-worthy. That means having clean, structured product data and a consistent brand presence that is well-integrated across the digital ecosystem.
If your brand doesn’t show up in the right conversations, you risk being invisible – no matter how good your website looks.
Brand experience is your digital footprint
In this age of AI-powered commerce, both consumers and machines are exploring your brand and drawing conclusions based not just on design, but on data, credibility and consistency. Where once brand experience was a consumer-facing concept, it is now increasingly machine-interpreted.
AI systems evaluate digital touchpoints at scale through scraping data from customer reviews, product feeds, inventory listings, return policies, social sentiment, and more. They look at what you say about yourself, and they look at how your brand behaves.
Recent Adobe Analytics data shows why that messaging consistency matters. AI chat and search engines are already a major traffic source for retailers, with visits arriving from generative-AI referrals surging 1,300 % during the 2024 holiday season and continuing to double every two months. Those shoppers stay on-site longer, browse more pages, and bounce far less, indicating that LLMs reward brands whose product feeds, reviews and policies are clean, complete and current.
That means brand perception is no longer built only through ads or content. So ask yourself, Is your product description accurate across all platforms? Do your shipping and returns policies align with consumer expectations? Is your customer service response time matching what’s promised?
AI will surface the truth and filter out the fluff
AI evaluates your brand through what it can verify: product listings, inventory accuracy, shipping terms, customer reviews, and service responsiveness. These signals form the basis of visibility in recommendation engines and conversational search. When they’re complete, current, and consistent, your brand earns trust, both from machines and from customers.
This makes brand equity a shared outcome. It’s shaped by how well teams across operations, service, and logistics align behind the brand’s promises. Marketing can set the vision, but it’s every department that reinforces it.
Retailers who coordinate these signals, across systems and teams, create a brand experience that performs everywhere it appears. AI needs more than storytelling, it needs evidence.
What retail marketers must do next
The rise of AI-powered commerce is a wholesale shift in how brands are discovered, understood, and chosen. For retail businesses, this is both a challenge and a moment of reinvention.
It’s no longer enough to build a compelling brand story and push it through traditional channels. Instead, brands must design themselves to be legible, trustworthy, and recommendable within AI systems.
And that requires a rethink of how teams collaborate, how data is managed, and how every touchpoint contributes to the brand’s perceived value.
For retail leaders, this is the strategic priority: evolving brand experience from a surface layer into an integrated, operational system. A brand that performs as well behind the scenes as it does on the surface is one that will thrive – in AI results and in the loyalty of the customer.
Contributor: Jason Knight, chief strategy officer at Luckybeard
