AI Agents Shift Power From Marketing to Metadata

Merchants have spent much of the eCommerce era obsessed over understanding a single buyer: the human at the other end of a screen, swayed by brand storytelling, emotional triggers, intuitive design, and social proof.

But a second customer class has quickly and stealthily entered the marketplace. This new customer does not browse, feel, or behave according to any of the norms that have shaped modern commerce.

This customer is the AI agent.

Findings in the report, “Prompt Economy: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, reveal that agentic AI tools like Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, Google’s AI-enabled Chrome, and Windows’ Model Context Protocol have moved discovery and transaction away from the website and into conversational surfaces.

Shoppers in the 21st century increasingly begin their discovery journey with a prompt rather than a search bar, asking an AI assistant to ‘find a black organic cotton tee under $40 or a gift that ships by Friday,’ for example.

AI customers don’t care about beautiful homepages or cinematic campaigns. They cannot be dazzled by product photography. They evaluate brands through an entirely different lens: structured data quality, machine-readable policies, endpoint reliability, and fulfillment performance.

This shift is creating a dual-consumer reality unlike anything retailers have experienced.

Winning Over Shoppers Who Never See Your Site

In the world of agentic commerce, a product’s competitive edge is determined not only by its quality or brand halo but by the precision of its metadata. A shirt may be beautifully designed and sustainably produced, but if its attributes are incomplete, inconsistent, or vague, the agent will not recommend it. And if the agent does not recommend it, the human never encounters it.

AI agents don’t browse like humans. They don’t read homepages, scroll through product pages, interpret marketing fluff, or muddle through broken checkout flows. They make decisions purely by comparing structured facts. And that creates a pivotal shift: every merchant now has two customers to serve at once. One is the human moved by brand and emotion, and the other is the agent that cares only about clean data, clear rules, and verifiable performance.

As a result, the operational areas traditionally hidden from customers, such as inventory accuracy, delivery predictability, dispute processes, and payment tokenization, have suddenly become frontline differentiators.

The most forward-looking merchants have already begun reorganizing around this dual-customer reality. Their journey often begins with a realization that their systems contain fragmented, inconsistent data that no agent can meaningfully interpret.

Read the report: Prompt Economy: When Bots Are the Customer

It is tempting to treat agent-readiness as a technical project, something to layer onto existing systems. But the shift is more fundamental. It asks organizations to acknowledge that the definition of a customer has expanded, and this shift from page-driven to data-driven commerce may change the internal physics of a retailer.

Agents are ruthless about reliability. If a checkout flow has a glitch, a missing shipping option, or a confusing error message, humans may retry. Agents simply abandon. This dynamic will force merchants to harden their operational stack — payment gateways, inventory syncs, logistics data, APIs, and availability feeds.

A single product launch or press release won’t announce the shift in commerce. It could spread gradually as more consumers let agents make simple decisions on their behalf. Merchants who ignore this trend may wonder why their visibility drops, their conversions decline, or their sales shift to competitors with better data.

After all, the ecosystem is far from standing still. As the report noted, Visa’s own Intelligent Commerce framework already powers agent-led transactions. Its MCP server and Agent Toolkit connect tokenized payments, authentication and fraud controls so that agents can buy safely on behalf of consumers.