A second type of customer has swiftly and quietly entered the marketplace. This new customer neither browses nor behaves according to the traditional norms that have shaped modern commerce. This customer is the AI agent. The report “Prompt Economy™: When Bots Are the Customer, ” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, highlights that agentic AI tools such as Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, Google’s AI-enabled Chrome, and Windows’ Model Context Protocol have shifted discovery and transactions from websites to conversational interfaces. Nowadays, shoppers increasingly start their search with a prompt instead of a search bar, asking an AI assistant for something like “a black organic cotton tee under $40” or “a gift that ships by Friday. ” AI customers aren’t interested in attractive homepages or cinematic advertising campaigns. Product photography doesn’t impress them. Instead, they assess brands based on a different set of criteria: the quality of structured data, machine-readable policies, endpoint reliability, and fulfillment efficiency. This evolution is creating a dual-consumer reality unlike anything retailers have faced before. Winning Over Shoppers Who Never Visit Your Site In agentic commerce, a product’s competitiveness depends not just on its design or brand reputation but on the accuracy and completeness of its metadata. A well-crafted, sustainably made shirt won’t be recommended if its attributes are incomplete, inconsistent, or unclear. If the agent doesn’t recommend it, the human customer likely won’t see it. AI agents do not navigate sites like humans. They don’t browse homepages, scroll through product listings, interpret marketing language, or endure flawed checkout experiences. Instead, decisions are entirely driven by comparisons of structured facts. This creates a crucial shift: merchants now have two customers to serve simultaneously. One is human, influenced by brand and emotion, and the other is the agent, concerned solely with clean data, transparent rules, and verified performance. Consequently, operational areas previously hidden from customers—such as inventory accuracy, reliable delivery, dispute handling, and secure payment tokenization—have become key differentiators. Leading merchants are already adapting to this dual-customer landscape.

They often start by recognizing that their existing systems harbor fragmented, inconsistent data that no agent can fully understand. It is tempting to see agent-readiness as just a technical upgrade to current systems. However, this change is deeper, requiring companies to accept that the concept of a customer has expanded. The transition from page-driven to data-driven commerce has the potential to alter the internal dynamics of a retailer. Agents demand high reliability. If a checkout process has a bug, a missing shipping option, or a confusing error, humans might try again. Agents, however, will simply abandon the process. This reality compels merchants to strengthen their operational infrastructure—including payment gateways, inventory synchronization, logistics data, APIs, and availability feeds. There won’t be a single product launch or announcement signaling this shift in commerce. Instead, it will unfold gradually as more consumers allow agents to make straightforward purchasing decisions for them. Merchants who overlook this trend may find their visibility waning, conversions dropping, or sales migrating to competitors with superior data. Meanwhile, the ecosystem is evolving rapidly. As the report notes, Visa’s Intelligent Commerce framework already supports agent-led transactions. Its MCP server and Agent Toolkit integrate tokenized payments, authentication, and fraud prevention, enabling agents to shop securely on behalf of consumers.