The retail landscape is shifting beneath our feet, and for the first time, the “customer” visiting your website might not be human at all.
A recent report by the Toronto Star highlighted a fascinating case: Steven Hoel, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, discovered that ChatGPT had become his sixth-largest source of referral traffic, generating over 50 orders for his niche clothing brand. He hadn’t spent a dime on advertising for it. The AI simply “found” him.
This isn’t just a quirky anomaly; it is the first signal of a massive structural shift in digital commerce. We are moving from the era of Search to the era of Agentic AI, where algorithms don’t just list blue links, but actively select, recommend, and eventually purchase products on behalf of users.
For privacy and data governance professionals, this raises critical questions. In an ecosystem where an AI is the gatekeeper, how do we ensure transparency? And more importantly, how do businesses build the “digital trust” required to thrive in this new economy?
Shopify recently reported that traffic from AI tools to merchants has jumped sevenfold since January 2024. But the real game-changer is the transition to “Agentic AI.”
Unlike a standard chatbot that answers questions, an AI agent is autonomous. It can access a web crawler (like OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot), read a return policy, compare specifications against a user’s history, and execute a checkout.
For retailers, this creates a…
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