https://www.marketingtechnews.net/ :The move from traditional e-commerce to agentic commerce is accelerating, marking a significant transition in how products are distributed, marketed, and purchased. Many brands are beginning to adapt their digital infrastructure not only for human consumers, but for AI agents acting on their behalf.

Spotify’s integration with AI assistants demonstrates how this change is not just affecting retail, but also how consumers discover and interact with digital services. With Muse, Meta’s latest personal agent, users no longer have to open Spotify and navigate its services manually. Instead, the AI agent can interact with the platform on their behalf, finding music, curating playlists, and completing actions through natural conversations.

A Spotify announcement read, “Your agent can play music on Spotify, save songs to your Library, build playlists, help you find a book or podcast, and more – all from a conversation.”

This introduces a new question for brands – will AI-agent distribution strategies become as important as having an app, website, or social presence? 

Industry Standards: Google & Shopify’s UCP
As Spotify makes itself available through AI assistants, it highlights how companies are beginning to think beyond attracting people into their apps. Traditionally, brands have invested heavily in getting visitors to their site, app, or online store, but agentic interfaces may be reversing this model. Rather than working to attract the consumer to the brand, products and services are becoming accessible within the AI environment that the consumer has chosen. 

Shopify has also entered the agentic commerce race, opening its merchant ecosystem to AI platforms enabling consumers to find and purchase products through conversational AI. 

In early 2026, the multinational e-commerce company announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a “new open standard co-developed with Google to bring commerce to agents at scale.” This “native shopping” has been introduced across Google’s AI Mode and Gemini, alongside an embedded checkout via Microsoft Copilot and integrations with ChatGPT.

Through its agentic plan, brands on other platforms can also make their products available through the Shopify Catalog, selling across supported AI channels. AI assistants are no longer simply sources of traffic; they are being treated as distribution channels where product discovery and purchases can happen. 

Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, commented on the shift to agentic commerce, saying it will, “require a shared language across the ecosystem and the Universal Commerce Protocol provides that framework.”

The larger goal for brands may be to turn conversational AI interfaces into potential commerce channels. Search engines, AI assistants, and other conversational platforms are becoming places where consumers not only discover products, but compare options and complete their purchases, without needing to follow the traditional journey to a brand’s website or app. 

The potential scale is considerable. Google says people already use its platform to shop “more than a billion times a day.” To continue to meet the demands of online shopping, Google has been “building the foundation for agentic commerce,” improving common language for agents with UCP.

Google has taken a similar approach to Spotify and Shopify with its Universal Cart, an AI-powered shopping experience that spans Search and Gemini. Here, consumers can add products from multiple retailers, while Gemini monitors prices and availability, and even recommends alternatives.  

Google’s UCP, meanwhile, enables participating retailers to support checkout through Google Pay directly from the cart. Brands including Nike, Sephora, and Walmart are set to support select checkout capabilities, once again signalling how AI platforms are now helping in transactions themselves. 

SEO meets ACO 
The transition from SEO to Agentic Commerce Optimisation (ACO) is redefining how brands structure their digital presence. Brands increasingly need to serve two audiences: human customers and the AI systems acting on their behalf.

Traditional e-commerce tends to rely heavily on visual storytelling and emotional copy to drive click-through rates, but AI agents evaluate products based on data clarity. For brands to find success in an agentic marketplace, they must adapt for real-time API performance, structured metadata, and integration into LLM pipelines. 

Success will likely become measured on how often an agent selects a product and successfully completes an automated transaction. An agent-made purchase could place greater weight on machine-readable factors such as product availability and pricing, alongside the brand signals that continue to influence human preferences. That could disadvantage brands whose product data is incomplete, inconsistent or difficult for agents to access.

The emergence of agentic distribution means brands need to prepare for a human-AI audience, something that will be discussed in detail by experts at DMWF’s upcoming conference in Amsterdam. 

Human branding still matters, but more transactions may be negotiated by algorithms behind the scenes. The brands best positioned for this change may not simply be those with the most persuasive marketing but those that combine human brand preference with a digital presence built for both people and AI agents..