Agentic AI systems and conversational shopping assistants, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and emerging retail-focused agents, are reshaping how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. What once happened across multiple branded touchpoints is now compressed into a single, AI-driven interaction.
For brands, this shift represents a powerful opportunity and a disruptive threat. AI can deliver unmatched convenience and recommendations, but risks weakening brand visibility and redefining the mechanics holding customer loyalty together.
To understand how brands can thrive in this new environment, Loyalty360 spoke with industry leaders from FIS, Bond Brand Loyalty, and Loyalty Juggernaut about the strategic, operational, and emotional implications of AI-mediated commerce, and what it means for the future of customer loyalty.
Contributors
Mladen Vladic, Head of Product, Payments Networks, FIS
Kienan McLellan, Director, Innovation & AI Solutions, Bond Brand Loyalty
Dave Andreadakis, Chief Commercial Officer, Loyalty Juggernaut
How AI Shopping Assistants Influence Brand Experiences
As agentic AI and conversational shopping assistants weave themselves deeper into consumer behavior, they are reshaping the traditional path to purchase, and the role brands play in guiding that journey. The convenience these systems offer is undeniable. They also introduce new risks for brands that have long depended on owning their digital touchpoints.
“Agentic AI is undeniably streamlining the consumer's path to purchase, offering incredible speed and convenience,” said Mladen Vladic, Head of Product and Payments Networks at FIS. “But this could be seen to come at a potential trade-off for brands. There is caution: the potential loss of direct customer engagement and control over the experience. While AI assistants can help by providing personalized recommendations, they also risk hindering brand-owned direct channels by becoming the primary point of interaction, abstracting the brand from the consumer.”
This presents a challenge for brands that lean heavily on storytelling and visual identity. Kienan McLellan, Director of Innovation and AI at Bond Brand Loyalty, notes that when shopping begins inside assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini, brands must adapt to a new decision-making environment.
“When the shopping assistant is guiding the journey, the emotional context and visual craft of brand-building get flattened into structured facts: price, availability, ratings, and feature clarity,” he said. “Brands that rely heavily on intangible positioning find it harder to stand out when every answer starts in the same conversational frame.”
To maintain influence, companies like FIS are building solutions that allow brands to embed value directly into AI-mediated transactions.
“Our Smart Basket solution helps retailers embed real-time intelligence and personalized incentives directly into the transaction,” Vladic said.
The result: a way to preserve targeted value even when customers never visit a brand-owned property.
Retail Opportunities in Early AI Adoption
For retailers, integrating with AI-based shopping assistants can be a strategic advantage that shapes how their brand, products, and value propositions will be interpreted in an AI-mediated marketplace. Early adopters can influence how agents understand their category and how loyalty, relevance and differentiation are encoded into future shopping journeys.
“Early adopters get to teach the agents what good looks like for their category and make sure loyalty value, not just price, is part of the decision logic,” said Dave Andreadakis, Chief Commercial Officer for Loyalty Juggernaut.
With AI increasingly acting as the first point of discovery, ensuring these systems understand the nuances of a brand’s value is critical.
Vladic reinforces the importance of getting ahead of this shift. Early integration, he said, helps retailers build deeper brand affinity and maintain competitiveness as AI becomes embedded in more purchase decisions. The real opportunity comes from intelligent data use.
“By integrating AI-based shopping agents, retailers can enable dynamic, SKU-level basket intelligence, allowing them to deliver personalized value and targeted offers at the most impactful moments. This approach not only influences immediate purchasing decisions but also provides receipt-backed insights to refine future promotions and optimize inventory strategies.”
Early adopters can ensure their brand is represented accurately as AI platforms increasingly serve as category gatekeepers.
“Retailers that integrate early with AI-based shopping agents stand to gain first-mover credibility and influence over how their products and services are represented within these ecosystems,” McLellan said. “As assistants become a critical layer of discovery, brands that organize their product data, content, and metadata with precision will be better positioned for inclusion, accuracy, and relevance.”
Their perspectives point to a clear takeaway: early adopters will set the standards, shape the data, and command the visibility that determines how AI recommends them to consumers. In a landscape where AI agents may soon guide many purchase decisions, being early isn’t just beneficial; it’s foundational to future competitive advantage.
What AI-Mediated Purchases Mean for the Future of Loyalty
As AI-driven interfaces like ChatGPT’s “Instant Checkout” begin handling full transactions, brands face a fundamental shift: customers may complete purchases without ever visiting a brand’s site or app. This disruption threatens traditional loyalty enrollment, engagement, and first-party data collection, which is ultimately the foundation of long-term customer relationships.
“When customers never visit a brand’s site or app, traditional methods for loyalty program enrollment, engagement, and first-party data collection are fundamentally disrupted,” Vladic said. “Brands risk losing the direct relationship that underpins customer loyalty.”
The challenge goes deeper than visibility. AI systems now capture the intent, motivation, and contextual signals that once powered rich personalization. “Zero-party data that once strengthened personalization in brand-owned experiences now sits with the chat agent—and becomes largely inaccessible,” McLellan said.
In this environment, brands can no longer rely on controlled interfaces to deliver loyalty value. They must rethink how loyalty mechanics function when discovery and purchase occur inside AI ecosystems they don’t own.
“Personalization should focus on portable preferences and clear policies that can travel with the customer into any channel rather than screen-specific tactics that assume you control the pixels,” Andreadakis said.
This requires a more dynamic, real-time approach to rewards and recognition.
“Loyalty mechanics such as points accrual, tier benefits, and personalization need to become more adaptable and dynamic,” Vladic said. “The future lies in offering SKU-level incentives triggered at the exact moment of interaction. By leveraging real-time data and contextual insights, brands can influence customer choices and provide tailored value at the item level.”
Rather than resist these shifts, Vladic said brands must integrate directly into AI-driven environments. That’s the foundation of FIS Smart Basket, which embeds loyalty incentives, item-level offers, and point accrual into transactions across issuer apps, POS systems, and third-party platforms.
“This allows retailers to deliver personalized value and maintain engagement – even within an AI-driven checkout flow – with proof of performance through transparent reporting,” he said. “By connecting item-level offers, coupons, and loyalty points into a seamless transaction, you ensure the brand’s value is still felt, fostering loyalty no matter the channel.”
How Brands Stay Visible When AI Controls the Cart
When AI assistants mediate the shopping journey, brand differentiation must happen beyond the transaction itself.
“Brands can rise above the noise by creating exceptional experiences precisely at the checkout moment,” Vladic said.
But lasting differentiation increasingly happens outside the transaction. As McLellan explains, AI systems learn from the same sources customers do: social conversations, public reviews, and shared real-world experiences.
“Positive experiences that customers share on platforms like Reddit or independent review forums become part of the information ecosystem that shapes how AI systems evaluate and recommend products. Every experience a customer has becomes training data for the next generation of discovery.”
This makes everyday brand interactions more important than ever.
“Routine in-store treatment, the ease of returns, the quality of delivery, and the tone of post-purchase interactions all contribute to how people talk about a brand—and how AI perceives it,” McLellan said.
“Product satisfaction will remain foundational, but how a brand responds when things go wrong will likely carry even more influence in a world where feedback loops are constant and public.”
When AI controls the cart, consistency, service, and real-world experience become the new drivers of visibility. Brands that deliver reliably will be the ones AI continues to recommend.
Loyalty in the Age of AI Will Depend on Adaptability, Transparency, and Experience
As AI becomes the primary gateway to product discovery and purchase, the foundations of loyalty are being rewritten. Brands can no longer rely solely on owned channels, traditional enrollment flows, or static reward structures. Instead, loyalty must become portable, contextual, and embedded directly into wherever the customer chooses to shop.
To remain competitive, brands must:
- Integrate early to shape how AI understands their category.
- Embed loyalty value directly into transactions, regardless of channel.
- Design flexible, real-time loyalty mechanics that AI can interpret and apply.
- Invest in exceptional experiences, knowing every interaction shapes both customer sentiment and AI recommendations.
As AI increasingly “chooses” for the customer, the brands that succeed will be those that build trust, deliver consistent value, and show up across every environment, even the ones they don’t control.