The world of online commerce is changing rapidly. Now more than ever, consumers use AI tools to research into, search for, and buy products. This shift is changing how brands connect with customers…but how are companies making sure they remain visible in AI search tools? Four senior e-commerce and marketing execs weigh in.
Michele Centemero, EVP Services, Mastercard Europe
“AI is rapidly redefining commerce and changing the way consumers discover, choose and buy products online. In a world of relentless digital noise, consumers gravitate to brands that can quickly understand their intent and anticipate their needs. Personalised shopping experiences are no longer a ‘nice to have’ but are quickly becoming key to success for businesses across all sectors.
“AI can now interpret richer data – from browsing behaviour to transaction patterns – to reveal the habits and dynamics that drive commerce. This enables brands to move beyond the guesswork and tap into a smarter, data-driven ecosystem that connects them to consumers in meaningful ways.
“By leveraging insights from billions of data points, businesses can deliver hype-personalised content and context-aware recommendations at scale. As well as helping to build longer lasting, deeper relationships with their customers, this level of personalisation can have a significant impact on conversion.”
Nikita Zverev, Global E-commerce Director, Groupe SEB 
“I break down the application of AI into two primary categories when it comes to e-commerce.
“The first category is efficiency in business functions. Companies are replacing their many dashboard functions and the manual reporting layer with AI agents, allowing their teams to make quicker informed choices. Examples include using an AI agent to manage your retail media campaigns across marketplaces, to automate content workflows like localisation or product page analysis, to automate content or video generation, and to analyse customer reviews and generate timely responses to consumers.
“The second category will be a transformation of the customer experience. Brands are moving from traditional search bars on their websites to new AI powered user interfaces that act like conversational assistants. As chatbots improve into more complex digital assistants, more brands are also deploying multimodal search across text, voice, and pictures.
“What is abundantly clear now is that AI is moving from an analytics tool to an integrated part of business processes where it will actively create operational efficiencies.”
Shishir Bhanot, Global Marketing Director, Pulse Advertising
“AI commerce is no longer experimental. It is shaping how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy products. Over 60 percent of global consumers say they are comfortable using AI to support purchase decisions. With GPT now introducing ads, it fundamentally changes the commercial stakes. AI interfaces are no longer neutral assistants; they are becoming paid discovery environments.
“Leading brands are embedding AI agents directly into their commerce experiences to act as always-on shopping assistants, reducing friction and driving conversion. In parallel, the focus is shifting from classic SEO to GEO (or AEO), ensuring brands surface accurately and credibly inside AI search, chat, and recommendation engines, both organic and paid.
“The real advantage comes from context. Brands are combining intent, behaviour, and signals like time, location, and device to deliver hyper-relevant recommendations, content, and offers in real time. AI is now a media, commerce, and experience channel combined. Brands that treat it as core infrastructure, not a side experiment, will win disproportionate share.”
Ed Freed, Global Chief Transformation Officer, RAPP
“The chaotic arrival of Clawdbot (and its brief identity crisis as Moltbot) just a week ago is the starting gun for agentic commerce. We are rapidly moving towards a world where your most frequent customer is a bot, efficiently executing complex, logical purchasing tasks while its human owner naps.
“For brands, this demands a schism. You now need a ‘machine-readable’ back-end optimised for MCP (Model Context Protocol), the Semantic Web, and whichever other agent standards win the current battle for supremacy. Agents crave logic and raw data to speed up high-consideration purchases.
“However, humans are still delightfully irrational. To complement this cold, agentic efficiency, brands must invest in highly emotive, rich-media experiences that look nothing like traditional websites. Let the bots handle the specs and spreadsheets; give the humans the vibes, video, and storytelling they actually care about.”
