Winning Visibility in Agentic Commerce
This first instalment tackles the challenge of the "shrinking digital shelf." We explain how AI is becoming the new authority for product recommendations, with an action plan to ensure you're not left behind.
Agentic Commerce: Engage the Human. Build for the Bot.
Your next competitor isn't another brand – it’s the agent’s shortlist.
What is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic Commerce is the next evolution of shopping - one in which AI-powered agents research, compare, and transact on a customer's behalf. As these agents become the front door to discovery, the question for brands shifts from 'will customers choose us?' to 'will the machines recommend us? Agentic Commerce isn't a checkbox, a plugin or a SaaS add-on. It's an enterprise capability that fundamentally changes how people shop, and how brands need to operate.
Data is the price of entry. If an agent can't parse your products, your taxonomy, or the actions it can take on your customers' behalf, you're invisible. And it's not just text anymore - image models are increasingly how your products are discovered. Get the foundations right, then the rest of the stack has something to stand on.
If you rely on outdated commerce strategies, you risk total brand invisibility to AI agents. We've written about this in our latest report "The New Model of Agent-led Transaction: Preparing to convert when your buyers aren’t human" where we explore the critical “convert” phase when it becomes autonomous. It's one of a series of reports that span the key stages of Agentic Commerce (see below to get your copy).
The VML Agentic Commerce report series
Agentic Commerce: The Complete Journey
Our flagship fourth strategic guide covers the full agentic commerce journey and examines the systems, experiences and operational foundations required to win in an AI-led market, including trust, governance, payments, observability, customer experience and loyalty.
LAUNCHING 29 JUNE
Why should you care about Agentic Commerce?
Historically, new channels expanded the "shelf." Agentic Commerce does the opposite: it compresses choice to a handful of agent recommendations.
- The Shortlist is the New Shelf: Brand visibility in AI surfaces now hinges on making an agent's curated list (1-5 products).
- A New Gatekeeper: Bots must choose you first. If AI agents can't see your brand, humans can't choose it.
- The Clock is Ticking: Platforms are building these shortlists now. Brands that excel in both 'human' and 'bot readiness' in the coming year will gain a material advantage.
The challenges of Agentic Commerce
While Agentic Commerce is shaping who buys, many brands continue to optimise for traditional customer journeys, leading to ineffective strategies or potential brand exclusion. Common AI commerce challenges include:
Lack of Clarity: Uncertainty about necessary changes across data, content, platforms, and measurement for brand visibility in AI surfaces.
Invisibility to Agents: Brands risk exclusion from AI shortlists if not "understood" or "trusted" by AI agents.
Outdated Strategies: Optimising for traditional journeys while AI fundamentally rewires discovery, leading to ineffective commerce strategies.
Complex Ecosystem: Engineering a single ecosystem that serves both agents and humans is a significant technical undertaking.
Surfaces you don't own. Products will increasingly be discovered, compared, and bought on surfaces you don't own and can't easily influence - navigated not just by customers, but by their agents too. Emerging protocols like UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) make your business easier to integrate into the machine world, but your own systems need to support the transition.
Our solution: Agent-Ready Commerce, Human-Ready Experiences.
VML engineers the end-to-end commerce stack to ensure agents understand, trust, and recommend your products, whilst simultaneously engaging humans with authentic experiences across all channels. As a result, VML believes the Agentic Commerce landscape will be won on two equally important, simultaneously required rails.
RAIL 1: ENGAGE THE HUMAN
This rail builds preference, trust, and brand love through authentic human experiences. Stronger human signals provide a structural advantage in the AI shortlist. This rail focuses on brand authority & discovery: (AEO/GEO content, creator programs, PR for AI-influence, establishing brand authority AI); experience that builds preference: (Campaigns, social content, storytelling); and retail & commerce moments: (Human discovery, visual merchandising, loyalty, personalisation).
Personalisation just got an upgrade. With the right context, an agent may know more about your customer than you do. Pair that with generative UI and the experience flexes to match intent, dynamic, personalised, and assembled around the customer rather than forcing them through a fixed homepage-to-PDP-to-checkout path.
Services include: AI strategy for brands, Agentic Readiness Audits (spans both rails), Lightning Innovation Sprints, Digital Concierge, AI Content Strategy & Delivery, Generative UI.
RAIL 2: BUILD FOR THE BOT
This rail builds infrastructure for discoverability, readability, and scalability. It ensures your brand is technically ready for AI agents, engineering your entire commerce technology ecosystem for effective AI product recommendation.
The Agentic Build Framework below sets out the five layers we work across, from data foundations through to agent-driven growth. Each layer is a discipline in its own right, so we engage at whichever layer you need, whether that's a single intervention or a thread pulled through all five. Our role is to shepherd your brand into the agentic world as it arrives, keeping pace with a landscape that's still forming and staging the build so you're ready as each surface, protocol and agent matures. A fuller enterprise capability map will accompany our forthcoming white paper, covering AI platforms, commerce primitives, identity, trust, governance and more.
Services include: Agentic Readiness Audits (spans both rails), AEO/GEO Strategy, Generative UI, UCP Implementation, Brand Agent build, A2A orchestration, Supporting Autonomous Transactions and more.
Why VML is the right partner
VML uniquely intersects creative experience and commerce technology. VML engineers a connected commerce ecosystem to make brands agent-eligible and human-desired. Our focus is connecting tech delivery and creative innovation with a commercial lens. Our expertise has been proven in practice:
Supergoop!: Achieved $5M+ revenue increase. Embedded AI product discovery simplified navigation and provided 1:1 AI recommendations.
Samsung: Saw 84% sales and 87% conversion increases. This was achieved by optimising product pages for AI for Amazon Rufus with agent-ready content standards.
Lego: Achieved a strong 3.8/5 agent-readiness score, outperforming a key competitor by 0.6 points. This resulted from a 69-point Commerce audit addressing potential brand invisibility to AI agents.
Book a strategy session to map your agentic readiness here
FAQ: Navigating Agentic Commerce
Agentic Commerce is the next evolution of shopping where AI-powered agents act as intermediaries. These bots research, compare, and even purchase products on behalf of customers, acting as the new front door to brand discovery.
Historically, new channels expanded the shelf. Agentic Commerce does the opposite by compressing choice. The shortlist is the new shelf, meaning brand visibility in AI surfaces now hinges on making an agent's curated list of just 1 to 5 products. If bots cannot see or choose your brand first, humans cannot choose it.
Brands face several challenges, including a lack of clarity regarding necessary changes across data and platforms, the risk of brand invisibility to AI agents, reliance on strategies built for traditional journeys, and the difficulty of engineering a complex, end-to-end commerce stack for both bots and humans.
Brands must win on two adjacent rails: "Engage the Human" and "Build for the Bot." This involves building preference and trust through authentic human experiences, while simultaneously building the technical infrastructure (like optimising product pages for AI and AEO) to ensure the brand is machine-readable and discoverable by AI agents.
VML uniquely intersects creative experience and commerce technology. We engineer a connected commerce ecosystem to make brands agent-eligible and human-desired. Our proven track record includes helping brands optimise for platforms like Amazon Rufus, resulting in significant increases in sales, conversion, and agent-readiness scores.
