Recently, I sat down with Steve Statler, CEO of AmbAI, expert in Ambient AI technologies, author of “Beacon Technologies,” and host of the Mr. Beacon Ambient IoT Podcast, to discuss the dramatic advances in AI. This report is the distillation of our wide-ranging conversation that we offer as a survival guide for retailers and brands.
The irreversible shift is already happening. ChatGPT is answering 1 billion searches per week. Traffic from AI to retail websites jumped 1,200 percent in a single month. Nearly 40 percent of consumers now use AI as a shopping assistant for researching products or planning purchases.
But research is just the beginning. The next wave of AI will be “agentic,” moving beyond answering questions to taking actions on our behalf, including making purchases. This represents a fundamental disintermediation threat from AI agents acting as intermediaries between brands and customers. Will this help or harm the brand and retailer connection to the consumer? Will this enhance or impede sales?
Once AI has unfettered access to product data, it becomes much harder to control the terms of engagement. The brands that survive won't be those with the biggest marketing budgets or the most shelf space. They'll be the ones who recognized that in an AI world, controlling the data bridge between digital intelligence and physical products is the ultimate competitive moat.
AI Agent Advantage
Like any procurement professional, this new generation of agents will seek to weaken the position of suppliers by restricting information flow, to get the best possible deal. Imagine a world where your AI agent negotiates directly with a supplier’s AI agent to purchase groceries, select insurance, or replace your T-shirts, jackets, worn-out shoes—all without you ever seeing a brand website, video, or advertisement. The negotiation strips away the positioning information and storytelling, which can bring value to products, by commoditizing the product that the brands are selling. Agent-to-agent transactions could spell the death of the branded experience, limiting all transactions to the lowest common denominator transactions, with us being none the wiser as to what we are being served. Clearly, this is a problem for brands, and the time is ripe for a proactive solution.
The solution lies in building a strategic alliance of brands, retailers, and technology partners that controls the data flow between consumers using AI to buy and the retailers and brands that supply them. This alliance would ensure brands maintain direct customer relationships while leveraging AI’s power to enhance rather than commoditize the shopping experience and storytelling that makes products valuable.
The Coming Disintermediation
Consider the structural and cultural shift we’re facing. AI is positioning itself between brands and customers, armed with three unprecedented advantages:
- Intimate customer knowledge: While Amazon knows what you’ve bought, AI knows why you bought it, what you use it for, and whether you really needed it. Through conversations about relationships, health, finance, and daily life, AI platforms are building the most comprehensive customer profiles ever assembled.
- The power of consumers’ automation bias. As termed by the National Institutes of Health, this bias is the very real and prevalent phenomenon when people, consumers, favor or give greater credence to information supplied by technology like AI agents and ignore contradictory evidence. When agents talk, with uncanny knowledge of our preferences, better mimicking human nuance and empathy and with more authority, we will listen.
- Complete product intelligence: AI can parse every specification, review, and data point about every product from every competitor, then analyze, compare, and negotiate faster than any human buyer.
This combination of customer knowledge and product intelligence is potent. Users won’t need to navigate websites or deal with limited store staff. AI will understand requirements, shop around, negotiate, and even create personalized content to tell the story of why Product X is perfect for Customer Y.
Traditional merchandising tools—placement, positioning, brand relationships—become irrelevant when a superintelligent purchasing agent is making decisions based purely on data and customer intimacy.
Walmart just announced it will focus its AI efforts on agency, hoping to attract more shoppers away from Amazon with four new super agents, with the goal that AI will drive its ecommerce growth, aiming for online sales to account for 50 percent of its total sales within five years. Designed to operate with minimal human oversight and execute complex tasks across Walmart’s vast ecosystem, the four agents include:
- Sparky (customer-facing)
- Associate (employee support)
- Marty (supplier automation)
- Developer (AI testing)
Walmart may be the first to announce such a fully automated decision-making platform for both brands and consumers, but it certainly won’t be the last.
AI: Disruptor in Chief
We can already see the evidence of agents’ disintermediation. Website traffic is falling measurably across the board as AI summaries are presented on the Google home page. These summaries satisfy a user’s question with zero click throughs to brand websites. Existential question: How can you directly influence consumers if they never see your messaging?
The AI powerhouses are actively preparing to take on purchasing tasks on behalf of your customers. Over one in four of the integrations recently announced by Anthropic was with payment systems PayPal, Square, and Stripe.
OpenAI announced its first services for brands, enabling purchases directly from ChatGPT. There will be no shortage of brands that accept the offer to participate in this pilot, desperate to show shareholders that they have an AI strategy that goes beyond writing marketing copy more efficiently.
The Data Fortress Strategy
The solution lies in controlling something AI desperately needs but currently can’t access at scale: real-world product data. Today, AI’s view of the physical world is surprisingly limited. Show ChatGPT a photo of a product, and it sometimes guesses wrong. AI typically can’t navigate auto-ID systems, struggles with barcodes and QR codes, and has no connection to RFID or emerging ambient IoT data streams.
But this data represents the largest untapped information pool in the world—trillions of physical items, each with massive datasets about ingredients, provenance, authenticity, location, and lifecycle history. This isn’t just defensive data—it’s the foundation for new business models around transparency, sustainability, and customer engagement.
This isn’t theoretical. The EU is mandating Digital Product Passports (DPPs) for apparel, toys, and furniture within two to three years. Products entering the world’s largest regulated market will need digital IDs with comprehensive provenance data. Like EMV chip-and-pin standards, what starts as regulatory compliance becomes a competitive advantage through reduced fraud, improved efficiency, and enhanced customer trust.
Any brand wanting to sell into Europe will need to develop its DPP systems. This will eventually be a formidable war chest of data that the AI companies won’t control. Brands already have an amazing cache of product information that they can use to differentiate a direct, brand-controlled, AI-enabled, shopping experience, which can make for a better, more consultative retail experience. Think of all the instruction manuals, recipes, videos and product information that can be fed into a brand-controlled AI.
Building an Alliance Moat
No single brand can defend against AI disintermediation alone. A single brand app with AI, no matter how good it is, will not stem this tide. We’ve seen most brands fail when they attempt to drive meaningful usage of an app that works with their products exclusively.
An alliance must include three key constituencies working in concert:
- Leading brands across categories (CPG, fashion, electronics, automotive) that control rich product data
- Progressive retailers who understand the value of customer relationships over pure efficiency
- Technology partners who can build and operate the neutral infrastructure required
If we are to offer utility, get frequency of use, and the intimacy that is key to an effective selling experience, a multi-tenant platform will be required that helps consumers manage their pantry, wardrobe, drinks cabinet and tool chest with a one-stop shop. This kind of platform lends itself to being used regularly, having utility, and building trust if it helps customers keep control of their data in a way that the AI giants are not disposed to do.
Timing is one crucial advantage: AI’s connection to the physical world is still being built. Like setting smartphone rules for teenagers, we get one chance to establish ground rules before the AI floodgate opens. Once AI has unfettered access to product data, it becomes much harder to control the terms of engagement.
The brands that survive won’t be those with the biggest marketing budgets or the most shelf space. They’ll be the ones who recognized that in an AI world, controlling the data bridge between digital intelligence and physical products is the ultimate competitive moat.
The Crossroads
Brands face an immediate binary choice: Build an alliance now while you still can or become a commodity product in an AI-driven marketplace where you have no direct customer relationship and compete solely on AI-optimized metrics. Europe is already on the case building a defense that will provide rich data about products that should not be handed over to the AI giants lightly.
While big tech races to capture consumer data, they’re conveniently overlooking a fundamental issue: giving consumers actual control and portability over their product ownership data, usage habits, and preferences.
The question is whether brands will proactively shape a system that leverages these opportunities in a way that consumers can trust or reactively comply with whatever emerges from Silicon Valley. This Alliance needs founding members now—brands willing to lead this new model of cooperative competition. The window for establishing ground rules is closing rapidly. Every day that passes without coordinated action is a day closer to permanent disintermediation.
Winter is coming. The question is whether retailers will work together to build the alliance moat or find themselves on the wrong side of it when the battle for market dominance begins.