A new kind of customer is shopping for you, and it is not human

Written by Shanaz Begum (pictured) from A.E.O REX

There is a new kind of shopper online, and frankly, it is a bit rude. It does not say hello. It does not browse your lovingly designed website. It does not appreciate the witty tagline you agonised over for three days. It is an AI agent, it is here to do a job, and in 2026 it is quietly becoming one of the most important customers your business will ever serve.

I know how that sounds. But stick with me, because this is not a robots are coming for us all kind of article. It is a here is something genuinely useful you can do something about kind of article.

Let me start with the numbers, because they are hard to argue with. A 2026 IBM study found that 45 per cent of consumers already use AI for at least part of their buying journey, whether that is comparing prices, skimming reviews, or sniffing out a better deal.

McKinsey reckons agentic commerce could be worth between three and five trillion dollars globally by 2030. That is trillion, with a T, which is the kind of number that stops being money and starts being a phone number.

So this is not some far off prediction. It is happening now, and it is quietly deciding which businesses get chosen and which get politely ignored.

What on earth is agentic commerce

Picture how online shopping normally works. Someone types a question into Google, gets a list of links, opens nine browser tabs, loses track of which tab was playing music, compares a few options, and eventually types in their card number with a small sigh. Every single step needs a human staring at a screen.

Agentic commerce skips most of that faff. Instead, the customer simply tells their AI assistant something like "find me a reliable accountant in Birmingham within my budget" or "reorder my usual supplies before I run out again," and the AI handles the rest.

It researches, compares, checks availability, and often completes the purchase on the person's behalf. The human sets the goal and gives the final nod. The software does the running around.

Think of it as that one supremely organised friend who offers to do all your Christmas shopping, actually does it properly, and only texts you once to confirm the budget. Except this friend now lives inside tools millions of people already use every day, like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity.

Why this changes the rules for SMEs

Here is the bit that really matters for your business, so I will say it plainly. When a human visits your website, they are forgiving. If your layout is a little clunky, they fill in the gaps. They might even admire your cat themed error page.

An AI agent does no such thing. It has zero interest in your branding and even less in your feelings. It does not read your website the way a person does. It reads clear, structured, machine readable information, and if it cannot find what it needs in about half a second, it shrugs and moves straight on to a competitor who made life easier. No hard feelings. Just lost business.

In other words, being findable and being usable by machines are becoming the same thing. If an AI cannot understand your prices, your services, your availability, and why you can be trusted, you vanish at the exact moment someone is deciding what to buy.

The really uncomfortable part is that you will never even know it happened, because the whole conversation took place somewhere you could not see.

Now for the good news, and there is plenty. The businesses winning here are not always the giants with bottomless marketing budgets. They are the ones whose information is clearest, most consistent, and most trustworthy.

The AI genuinely does not care how big you are. It cares whether it can confidently recommend you without looking silly. That levels the playing field in a way small businesses rarely get, so I would take the win.

Where this connects to what we do at AEO-REX

This is precisely why I founded AEO-REX. We specialise in Answer Engine Optimisation, which is a fancy way of saying we make sure your business is visible, understood, and recommended by AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

As the founder of the UK's first Answer Engine Optimisation consultancy for SMEs, I am now the UK's first agentic commerce specialist for SMEs too, which is a sentence I did not expect to be writing a year ago.

Agentic commerce is simply the next chapter of that same story. First, AI assistants started answering questions and recommending businesses. Now they are starting to act on those recommendations and actually buy things. If you are not visible and citeable to AI today, you will not be selectable by AI tomorrow. The two go hand in hand, and sorting your foundations out now puts you comfortably ahead of competitors who are still treating AI as a problem for future them.

The reassuring part is that you do not need to bulldoze your business and start again. The early moves are refreshingly practical. Keep your core information accurate and consistent everywhere it appears. Build real credibility signals that an AI can find and trust. Keep your promises tight, because AI systems quietly reward businesses that are reliable and quietly penalise the ones whose details wander about like a toddler in a supermarket. None of this is exotic. Agentic commerce just turns up the consequences of getting it right.

The simple takeaway

You do not need a computer science degree to act on any of this. You just need to understand the shift. The decision about whether your business gets picked is increasingly being made by software, on behalf of a human, in a place you cannot see. Businesses that prepare now will quietly glide ahead. The ones that wait will be left scratching their heads, wondering where all the enquiries went.

Evolve or become extinct has always been our tagline at AEO-REX. With agentic commerce, it has never felt quite so literal, and I am trying very hard not to make a dinosaur joke here.

If you would like to find out how visible your business currently is to AI, or how to get ready for what is coming, I would genuinely love to talk it through with you on a free discovery call. No jargon, no pressure, and no robots.

Visit aeo-rex.com, email shanazbegum@aeo-rex.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn

Shanaz Begum, founder and chief executive of AEO-REX, the UK's first Answer Engine Optimisation consultancy for SMEs and the UK's first agentic commerce specialist for SMEs