How AI agents will reshape every part of marketing in 2026
Soon, AI agents won't just assist customers - they'll be the customers. They'll search, compare, negotiate, buy and follow up. Quietly. Instantly. And mostly without touching your website's UI.
If your brand can't be found, parsed, and trusted by machines, you'll be left out of the buy loop. This is the shift to plan for right now.
From omnichannel to agentic commerce
Marketers spent a decade perfecting omnichannel flows. Agents don't care. They hit APIs, not menus. Mark Menell of Silicon Foundry puts it simply: retailers that expose catalog and loyalty data via APIs become agent-friendly storefronts and win share.
The rule: if your product data isn't structured and accessible, it doesn't exist to the systems doing the buying.
Agents don't shop - they decide
Eii Promisel notes that shopping, payments, and financing are moving to autonomous agents. Banks won't compete on app UX; they'll compete on API access and trust. People still spark demand, but AI executes the transaction.
Your job: make your brand visible, interpretable, and credible to machines acting on a customer's behalf.
Agent-to-agent commerce compresses time
"In 2026, a meaningful share of customer interactions will happen agent-to-agent," said Gareth Cummings of eDesk. Shoppers' assistants will check stock, confirm delivery times, or verify returns. Brands will respond with their own agents that read order data and act instantly.
Speed becomes a moat. Unified systems win. Legacy tech and data silos make you invisible.
Consumers are ready - but still want choice
Incubeta found 70% of consumers are open to AI help with shopping. But convenience isn't a free pass. Shannon Millard at Epsilon warns: build AI ecosystems that protect customer agency. Automation should amplify choice, not suffocate it.
If your experience feels like a trap, people will opt out.
AgentOps is marketing's new must-have
Deploying one agent is easy. Operating hundreds is where things get real. Joao Moura of CrewAI expects AgentOps to sit between engineering and operations in 2026 - monitoring cost, reliability, policy, and outcomes.
Large enterprises will stand up "Agent Factories": controlled environments to design, test, and launch multi-agent workflows with proper oversight.
Make your marketing stack agent-ready
Here's the practical checklist to stay in the conversation:
- Real-time responsiveness: Agents don't wait. Target sub-second lookups and clear SLAs.
- Structured data: Clean product schema, consistent attributes, GTINs/SKUs, live pricing and inventory, machine-readable policies. If an LLM can't parse it, it won't rank it.
- API-first surfaces: Catalog, inventory, loyalty, pricing, promos, order status, returns. Read/write where safe, with scopes and rate limits.
- Protocol readiness: Prepare to integrate with standards like OpenAI's ACP and Google's AP2 as they mature.
- Interoperability: Event-driven architecture, webhooks, and pub/sub across commerce, CRM, CDP, and service tools.
- Trust and identity: OAuth2, consent receipts, audit trails, model cards, and policy-as-code to document what agents can do.
- New KPIs: Track "Share of Model" - how often assistant systems recommend your brand vs. competitors across key intents.
- Observability: Monitor cost per resolved intent, deflection rates, model drift, data freshness, and vector-store hygiene.
- Human control: Clear user overrides, one-click human escalation, and transparent agent decisions by default.
Don't let hype build a frankenstack
Kate Frost at IMG has the right warning: AI helps only when used at the right point in the process. Random pilots scattered across teams create shadow spend and brittle workflows.
CMOs should pick a small set of high-volume use cases, define the rollout plan, and support change management so teams aren't spooked. Do that, and ROI follows. Skip it, and things get worse before they get better.
SaaS still matters - paired with agents
Contrary to the hot takes, AI isn't replacing SaaS. It's extending it. Ross Meyercord of Propel Software says the winners will pair SaaS workflows and governance with agent speed and reach.
The next wave of agents won't live inside a single app. They'll coordinate across your ecosystem, turning disconnected steps into a single, intelligent flow.
You're not late - yet
According to McKinsey, 62% of organizations are still experimenting with agentic AI and only 23% are scaling. In retail, most are still in pilots. A report from Acxiom found 97% of companies expect conversational agents to be mainstream within two to three years.
You have a window. Use it to build foundations, not one-off demos. The moment agents stop "seeing" you, recovery gets expensive.
A simple 90-day starter plan
- Weeks 1-2: Audit product data and APIs. Fix schema, IDs, pricing, inventory freshness. Publish a read-only catalog endpoint.
- Weeks 3-4: Add inventory, order status, and returns APIs with auth scopes. Set sub-second targets.
- Weeks 5-6: Launch an agent-to-agent pilot for order status and returns. Instrument logs and outcomes.
- Weeks 7-8: Stand up AgentOps: cost monitors, policy gates, evaluation harnesses, and fallbacks.
- Weeks 9-12: Implement "Share of Model" tracking and optimize content/data to move that metric.
Keep your skills current
The bottom line
Agents are becoming buyers. Winners will be the brands that speak API, deliver answers in milliseconds, publish clean data, and measure "Share of Model" as seriously as share of voice.
Make your stack legible to machines now. That's how you stay in the cart - even when no human ever clicks "Add to cart."
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