Hanan Ouazan
Brands have long envied the troves of first‑party data sitting inside retailer systems. The average shopper enrols in roughly 13 loyalty programmes but stays active in barely half of them, so the “relationship” often stops at the cash register.
A new inflection point is emerging. Traffic routed from generative‑AI chatbots to US retail sites exploded by 1,950% last Cyber Monday, yet those visits still represent well under one percent of global search volume today. Google’s own AI Overviews now surface in fewer than 15% of logged‑in queries. That puts conversational discovery in the “one‑to‑low‑single‑digits” range—small enough to be ignored in quarterly dashboards, large enough to bend the arc of search behaviour.
Two open standards suggest the bend will accelerate. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns a brand’s product catalogue or order system into a plug‑and‑play socket for any LLM, eliminating the need for brittle screen‑scraping or custom APIs. Google’s new Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) protocol adds the missing lingua franca that lets those assistants negotiate tasks—“check stock, apply my perks, ship express”—across vendors and ecosystems. When both layers converge, a shopper could research, decide and purchase inside the same chat thread, with the retailer touching only fulfillment.
That possibility doesn’t pit brands against retailers so much as redraws their roles. Retailers retain the heavy lifting—logistics, service, last‑mile trust. Brands regain the early‑funnel context they lost and, for the first time, can inject richer first‑party data into a conversation that feels personal. If chat interfaces keep expanding their memory and intent modelling, they start to resemble an externalised CDP: Search engines still predict what we want, marketplaces still know what we buy, but the assistant begins to understand why.
For marketers the lesson is simple: make your data and services addressable, semantically clean and ready for an agentic world. The conversation is moving upstream; meet it there or watch someone else define your customer’s next question.
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