The news
Greg Kihlstrom at Martech argues that agentic commerce is changing what brand actually means — fast. With nearly 73% of B2B buyers already using AI tools to evaluate purchases, and Bain projecting that agentic AI will drive 25% of U.S. ecommerce by 2030, the first audience evaluating your brand may not be a human at all. It'll be software acting on a buyer's behalf, scoring your pricing transparency, fulfillment reliability, reviews, and loyalty value against a rubric the buyer never had to articulate themselves.
Our take
This isn't a branding think-piece. It's an ops problem — and it lands squarely on GTM teams.
Here's the shift underway: most B2B GTM orgs still treat brand as a perception game. Messaging, positioning, awareness. The assumption is that a human will read the website, feel the vibe, maybe book a demo. That model is cracking. When an AI agent is doing the first pass on vendor evaluation — and it increasingly is — it's not reading your hero copy. It's pulling structured signals: pricing availability, review volume and recency, policy clarity, SLA data, integration compatibility.
The uncomfortable truth is that most GTM teams don't control those signals and don't even think of them as marketing assets. That's a gap that compounds as agentic buying behavior scales.
The B2B parallel is the most urgent. Procurement tools, AI buying assistants, and autonomous research agents are already synthesizing vendor shortlists before a human ever gets involved. If your product data is buried in a PDF, your pricing requires a demo call to unlock, and your G2 profile hasn't been touched in 18 months — you are invisible to that first pass. Emotional brand resonance doesn't help you when you're filtered out before a human sees the list.
The GTM teams that win in an agentic buying environment are the ones who treat structured, machine-readable data as a distribution channel — not a compliance checkbox.
The so-what
- Audit your machine-readable footprint this quarter. Review sites, pricing pages, integration directories, API docs, knowledge bases — where does an AI agent go to evaluate you, and what does it find?
- Make pricing and policy legible without a human gate. "Contact us for pricing" is a filter-out signal in an agentic evaluation loop.
- Treat your G2, Capterra, and category review presence like a demand gen channel — because for agentic buyers, it is one.
Brand has always needed to convert. Now it needs to convert software first, humans second.