Will AI Agents Change the Way We Shop?
For years, we’ve used AI to help us find things.
Now, we’re beginning to ask it to do things for us.
Imagine telling an AI:
“Find me a sustainable skincare product under £30 that suits my preferences and reorder it when I run out.”
Instead of simply showing you search results, an AI agent could potentially compare products, evaluate the options and act on your behalf.
This is agentic commerce — and it could change how consumers discover and choose products.
What Happens When AI Becomes Part of the Customer Journey?
Traditionally, brands communicate primarily with people.
Packaging catches our attention. Advertising creates desire. Product information helps us make a decision.
But AI agents introduce another layer.
If an agent is helping a consumer choose between products, it needs to understand:
What is this product? What does it contain? Where does it come from? Is the information trustworthy? Does it match the consumer’s preferences?
That makes accurate, accessible digital product information increasingly important.
Connected Packaging Could Become the Bridge
This is where connected packaging gets particularly interesting.
A connected product can link the physical pack to a digital layer containing product information, provenance, sustainability details, services and consumer experiences.
Today, we largely think about that connection from a human perspective:
Scan → Discover → Engage.
But tomorrow, the same digital infrastructure could potentially help AI systems identify and understand physical products.
Packaging could therefore become an important bridge between the physical product and an increasingly AI-driven digital world.
What About Brand Loyalty?
There’s another interesting question.
If consumers increasingly delegate parts of shopping to AI, how will that affect the relationship between people and brands?
Imagine saying:
“Just buy whichever product best matches my preferences.”
Suddenly, product discovery may work very differently.
Brand identity and emotional connection won’t disappear, but brands may also need to ensure their products can be accurately understood by the intelligent systems helping consumers make decisions.
The Opportunity for Brands
Agentic commerce is still developing, but brands don’t need to wait to start asking useful questions:
Is our product information accessible and trustworthy?
Do our physical products have meaningful digital identities?
Are we building direct relationships with the people buying them?
And could connected packaging help connect those worlds?
As AI becomes more involved in commerce, the physical product isn’t becoming less important.
The connection between physical products and digital information could become more important than ever.
And packaging sits right in the middle.
Jenny Stanley speaks about connected packaging, AI, digital transformation and the future of consumer engagement at conferences, panels and corporate events around the world.
