A Guide for Brands to Think Critically About Agentic Commerce

Many on LinkedIn are speaking about things that I think are frankly irrelevant. There are few opportunities to capture true alpha in a marketing universe. A growing channel, we know consumers are in, that no one was fully figured out yet. Ultimately, agents/LLMs already are and will continue to influence all channels - including brick and mortar - and you better be prepared.

Here are the questions I would be asking myself as an organization about this new technology that are relevant to YOUR future. Now is the time to start setting up consistent measurements, which lead to experiments, which lead to results.

MIT studies about agentic revenue are worthless. It's like saying the Internet was useless in 1996. Look past both doomsayers and hypebeasters, and think like a data-driven marketer. And since you can't manage what you don't measure, that's where I start. Measurement.

1 - Are LLMs and agents influencing your consumers?

Are consumers telling you, and can you document consumers being influenced either automatically using analytics, or by the use of surveys.

2 - Is it growing or shrinking and how quickly?

Simply, how much should you care, and how would you even know if you aren't measuring?

3 - Does it seem to be affecting your attribution?

Should you be assigning credit differently to a conversation-based channel?

4 - Are there channels that seem to be rising and falling with or opposite LLM influence?

What do these trends mean for your business?

5 - What segment of consumers seem to be adopting most?

This is where it starts to get interesting. I would want to know - over time - how this previous set of metrics is being affected when overlayed against how you have segmented your customers today.

That's it as a first step. From my read, most people aren't even on step 1 here, and ultimately there is much more to do after this. And separately, most people are already starting to ask the wrong questions because they aren't asking questions like a brand operator.

One I see over and over on this medium:

"Is this sale fully agentic?" is a completely worthless question. Who cares? Consumer behavior is what matters. Then you can start to understand what to do about it.