By Wolf Ruzicka, Chief Commercial Officer at Unlimit
We’re now at a stage where you can ask an AI agent to find a reliable laptop under £1,000 that is powerful enough for work, suitable for travel, and deliverable to your address before the end of the week. The agent compares specifications, prices, reviews, delivery promises, and payment options, then recommends – and can increasingly purchase – the option that best fits the parameters you have set.
For the merchant, that customer may never have found them through Google, clicked on an advert, or even visited their website. More of the competition for that customer is starting to happen inside the agent’s decision-making process.
The customer acquisition process is changing. And with that, the notion of loyalty is also changing.
A customer may tell an agent to prioritise brands they trust, avoid certain marketplaces, or choose suppliers they have used before. In those cases, existing preferences become part of the agent’s instructions. But where the customer has not specified who to buy from, the merchant has to earn its place through the information the agent can access.
If a competitor offers clearer product information, firmer delivery guarantees, a simpler returns process, or a payment method better suited to the customer, software can identify the difference instantly.
A strong brand will still matter, but it will increasingly need to be backed up by things an agent can actually assess: accurate information, reliable fulfilment, and a buying experience that works.
The same is true of price. AI can make comparison easier, but the cheapest headline price will not always produce the best outcome for the consumer. An agent may also consider delivery times, taxes, exchange rates, warranties, returns, payment incentives, and the probability that an item arrives when promised. In other words, transparency – often treated primarily as a customer experience principle – is becoming a commercial imperative for attracting agentic buyers.
Payment choice itself will also become part of the calculation. An agent acting for a traveller, freelancer, or small business may be instructed to choose between cards, wallets, bank transfers, or account-to-account payments based on cost, speed, acceptance, or ease of reconciliation.
What merchants must do
Becoming machine-legible will be the first practical challenge merchants face. Product descriptions, stock levels, delivery windows, specifications, terms, and returns policies must be accurate, structured, and available in real time. A compelling advert may persuade a human, but an agent needs information it can interpret, compare, and verify.
Merchants need to approach this as something broader than simply optimising their website for crawlability. The entire commercial proposition must be understandable and actionable through structured data, APIs, and reliable operational systems. If an agent cannot confidently establish what is being sold, under what conditions, and whether it is available, the merchant may never enter the final consideration set.
Being selected is only half the challenge. Once that decision has been made, agents also need to be able to complete the transaction.
An agent-led payment must prove more than the validity of a card or account. The parties involved need to know who authorised the purchase, what the agent was permitted to do, whether it remained within spending, geographic, and product limits, and when human approval was required. The transaction may be technically sound, but it must also remain within the guardrails set by the consumer.
That means the payment cannot be separated from the permission behind it. Merchants and payment providers need to be able to establish not only that an agent can pay, but that it was authorised to make that particular purchase.
That becomes particularly important when transactions cross borders. Agents may need to navigate different currencies, local payment preferences, conversion costs, authentication rules, and regulatory requirements. Authority to make a domestic purchase does not automatically imply permission to accept an FX charge or use a different payment method in another jurisdiction. Infrastructure providers will therefore have an increasingly important role to play. With numerous layers of the transaction now being affected by an agent, the plumbing underneath must be more trusted and robust than ever.
Competition is changing. Merchants will still need compelling products and recognisable brands, but they will also compete on data quality, trust, local payment reach, and the ability to complete a transaction with minimal friction. What were once back-end considerations that consumers did not see are now becoming part of the buying decision itself.
Brand loyalty will continue to be a powerful force in determining what people buy. However, AI is going to make brands work harder to earn and retain that loyalty. Reputation must be backed by transparent value, reliable delivery, and a payment experience that works.
The merchants that win will be those that give AI agents as many reasons to choose them as they have traditionally given humans.
