Thought LeadershipThought Leadership

Your customers are already shopping with AI. The question is who they're talking to.

Picture a new runner shopping for shoes this evening. Instead of going right to an e-commerce website, they open ChatGPT and type: “Best value running shoes for flat feet, beginner-friendly, under €120 arriving before the weekend.” Within a few seconds, they have three options and a recommendation. Now, whose customer is this shopper considered to be?

The shift has already begun. It’s becoming more common for shoppers all over the globe to use conversational LLM like Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to search for what to purchase. AI is increasingly deciding what people even consider in the first place.

The change is happening in discovery, not checkout

McKinsey put it more cleanly than anyone: in agentic commerce, decision influence is here; execution is coming. In Europe, these AI providers are not shopping in place of customers…yet. They’re not placing orders; they’re not executing any payments. All these actions depend on payment rails, identity, and trust that haven’t been fully built here. But the influence on what shoppers discover and compare is already live. McKinsey finds nearly four in ten already rely on it to research products and inform purchases.

That’s not a forecast. That’s this year.

The opportunity

The situation in Europe is structurally different from North America, not behind it. And this is the part brands should be paying attention to.

In the US, agentic tools are already shopping for people: Google’s AI Shopping Mode, Amazon’s “Buy for Me,” ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout. BCG notes these remain on the horizon in Europe. Which, in their words, creates a window to experiment before agentic transactions become mainstream.

The trajectory is unmistakable and inevitable. We’re going to see referral traffic from AI tools to retail sites growing explosively, just like in North America, and brands who move now still have the early mover advantage.

The thing actually worth protecting

As AI mediates more of the discovery journey and eventually even the purchase, the risk here is brands quietly becoming interchangeable inside someone else’s recommendation tool. Disintermediation is happening: online retailers losing the direct relationship, the first-party data, and the loyalty that took years to build.

The instinct is to immediately optimize for the machines, to chase GEO (generative engine optimization) the same way that everyone once chased SEO. But in this case, you’re resigning and handing over the reins. You can’t optimize your way into controlling a channel you don’t own.

Only 5-10% of what AI engines reference is content a brand actually controls. The rest comes from reviews, publishers, and generally channels you don’t own. Emerging standards like Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) will increasingly decide who owns the checkout and often on their terms, not yours.

What getting ahead actually looks like

The one place you fully control is your own store and the conversation that happens there. A shopper who gets expert, personal guidance on your site is a happy customer relationship you keep. The data stays yours, the brand voice stays yours, and the loyalty stays yours. And every one of those conversations builds the understanding of your customers you’ll need when agents do arrive in force.

AI shopping assistants have become a well-established category, with many capable companies in it. Every company boasts the same kinds of results: higher conversion, more engagement, and a large share of customer service queries resolved automatically. The debate is mostly about magnitude, measurement and quality, not whether it’s a necessity to have on a web shop’s storefront. The precise figures vary by vendor, catalogue, method of measurement, but the direction is consistent.

Our own experience fits that pattern. Across more than 50 of the largest e-commerce brands in the Nordics and hundreds of thousands of AI-driven conversations every month, we’ve seen sales conversion rates lift by up to 40%, 80% of customer support tickets handled autonomously, and customer engagement increase by over 300%. Those brands continue to expand capabilities with us because when the ROI is nearly 7x, the decision to stay is easy.

The point isn’t any single number; it’s that the conversational layer already works. The brands deploying it now aren’t bracing for agentic commerce but quietly getting good at the thing it will reward and keeping their relationships.

Right now, owning the conversation with your shopper is a genuine edge. In less than a few years it will simply be the cost of staying in the game. Your customers are already shopping with AI. The question is whether they’re still talking to you.

If you’d like to see what an on-site shopping assistant could do for your store, we’re happy to walk you through it. Book a 30-minute conversation.