Jaspreet Bindra is the Founder & MD of a firm called Tech Whisperer. In this piece for ET, he says that AI enabled agents are already doing some of the online purchasing that humans used to do. For example, AI is apparently buying books online on behalf of other people. Mr Bindra says that such AI powered agents will transform ecommerce. As an example of the delights that await us, Mr Bindra says “If your Outlook calendar shows a friend’s birthday in two weeks, the agent will note it, suggest a cake and flower options within your usual price range, and ship them.”
These types of agents, says Mr Bindra, will also change how we “search” for things online: “Consumers are also changing how they find things. Gartner projects a 25% drop in traditional search volume by 2026, as discovery is moving from ’10 blue links’ to ‘one good answer’. Perplexity calls itself an ‘answer engine’, not a search engine. Rather than searching for a mobile phone and wading through reams of phones and features, customers are asking chatbots to give them an answer and discovering what they want to buy through a natural conversation with an ‘expert’. Logically, the next step would be for them to buy the phone they liked from the conversation window.”
This new type of search Mr Bindra says is very different from the “searches” we have been conducting for the past 20 years. How so? Because the results of the search will now be tailored to your personal tastes, demographics, budget, etc. So, two 46-year-old men from Mumbai searching for slippers could see radically different search results because the AI agent knows that these two men have different tastes and budgets. For brands this changes everything says Mr Bindra:
“Agentic commerce (a-commerce) heralds a transformational moment for brands. Decades of SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) expertise will gradually give way to what is beginning to be called AEO (answer engine optimisation): how to be spotted and recommended by AI. Startups like Profound, Refine and Algolia are emerging to monitor brand presence inside AI answers.
When the surface becomes a conversation, structured, machine-readable data beats glossy lifestyle copy. Agents prefer precise attributes – weight, durability, return policy, sustainability scores – over slogans. They reward speed: sub-3-sec sites rank higher for bots, not just humans.
Thus, the new a-commerce sites will have standardised product data, write with semantic intent (‘ultralight trekking shoe under 400g, monsoon-ready, size 9’) instead of keywords, and make pages load fast. Otherwise, bots will move elsewhere and explore machine-friendly offers.”
And there is another twist in this story. Just like you & I will have agents doing our online chores so will the brands. So our agents will “speak” to their agents “in machine terms and language. So, your AI (with your constraints: budget, sustainability, warranty, delivery window) will talk to a brand’s AI (with margins, inventory, promotion levers). They will bargain on bundles, delivery swaps or extended warranties, and close a deal after lightning-fast exchanges.”
We wonder what will happen to the millions of Indians who work in call centres when this brave new world of AI powered agents is upon us.
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