\n<\/p>\n
\u201cUniversal Cart normalizes the expectation of agent-assisted decision-making at a mass consumer level,\u201d says Holly Enneking, VP of marketing at Markup AI, an AI content software company. \u201cThis sets up a future where B2B buyers arrive at a sales conversation already filtered, scored, and pre-decided by AI, not by your storytelling, or your brand equity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Introducing agent-assigned decision-making as the new middleman between brands and consumers in the purchasing journey has some technologists predicting that brands\u2019 DTC touchpoints<\/a> could be taken out of the loop.<\/p>\n \u201cIn two to three years, the purchase journey as fashion brands have understood it will largely no longer exist,\u201d says Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI, which helps brands with their AI search strategies. \u201cThe shopper will set an instruction, an agent will execute it on their behalf, and the brand will find out it was selected, only when the order lands.\u201d<\/p>\n This means that when a consumer makes a purchase in Google\u2019s new cart after searching, checking emails, or watching YouTube, brands have fewer opportunities to influence the decision at the point of sale than they previously did through creative, merchandising, and last-minute upsell. Additionally, a major caveat is whether the agent even surfaced the brand in the first place.<\/p>\n Ever since Google and ChatGPT introduced dedicated AI shopping features this time last year<\/a>, brands and marketers have been reshaping their online brand visibility<\/a> so that products can be surfaced by both traditional search engine algorithms (via SEO) and AI models, via the emerging practice of \u201cAIO\u201d (AI optimization). Now, Google\u2019s Universal Cart puts an AI agent front and center, making the first round of decisions, rather than a consumer simply asking a chatbot a question and perhaps consulting traditional search at the same time.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Universal Cart alongside Google\u2019s Agent Payments Protocol, consumers are setting parameters for agents to buy on their behalf, which means a brand is either in the agent profile, or it\u2019s not in consideration, full stop,\u201d says Enneking. \u201cThat\u2019s a massive barrier to break through. It\u2019s not just about affinity anymore; it\u2019s about whether your brand relationship is strong enough to get encoded into how someone\u2019s AI agent shops for them.\u201d As it stands, Enneking doesn\u2019t think many brands are ready to confront or adapt to this shift.<\/p>\n According to Sinclair, the fields that power agentic reasoning, including product details like fit, materials, care, and compatibility, are simultaneously \u201cthe most ignored real estate\u201d in e-commerce. This compounds with additional factors outside a brand\u2019s control, such as online consumer product reviews and discussions in online forums like Reddit, which have seen a resurgence in utility in recent years and are known to aid AI\u2019s processing of information.<\/p>\n \u201cBrands auditing those attributes now are quietly setting themselves up to be the ones Universal Cart recommends. The ones ignoring them are about to find out how expensive that decision was,\u201d Sinclair says. Beyond product metadata, experts say Google\u2019s new AI shopping feature transforms brands\u2019 and retailers\u2019 inventory accuracy into a consumer-facing metric.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n