What if your next customer isn’t a person, but an AI agent acting on their behalf? And what if that agent is evaluating your brand on a purely logical, data-driven basis, completely devoid of the emotional hooks your marketing has always relied on?
Agility requires not just adapting to changing customer behaviors, but also redefining who—or what—our customer even is. It demands that we build operational and strategic frameworks that can cater to both human emotional drivers and the cold, hard logic of machines.
Today, we are at Forrester CX Forum East in Brooklyn, and we’re going to talk about a fundamental shift in the customer journey: the rise of the AI agent as an influential, and in some cases, decision-making persona. This isn’t just about using AI in our marketing; it’s about marketing to AI. We’ll explore what it means when our brand’s message needs to be optimized not just for human perception, but for machine interpretation and evaluation.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst at Forrester.
About Chuck Gahun
Chuck is a leader in Forrester’s Digital Business & Strategy practice serving business and digital executives. His research coverage includes content management systems (CMSes), product information management (PIM) systems, and commerce services and strategy for B2B and B2C companies. Chuck helps executives design strategies that deliver customer and business value by partnering with technology vendors and services providers. Chuck has 20 years of experience in content and commerce. He specializes in digital strategy, experience design, and technology initiatives in CMSes, e-commerce systems, digital asset management (DAM) systems, PIM systems, digital experience platforms (DXPs), and several others. He has led strategy and implementations for brands like Goldman Sachs, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Hilti, Marriott, AARP, and the Centers for Disease Control. Prior to joining Forrester, Chuck was a managing director and partner at Shift7 Digital (a Merkle company) and held senior management positions at ZS Medullan and Publicis Sapient. Chuck holds a BA in government and international politics and an MS in technology management from George Mason University.
Chuck Gahun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckgahun/
Resources
Forrester: https://www.forrester.com
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What if your next customer isn’t a person, but an AI agent acting on their behalf? And what if that agent is evaluating your brand on a purely logical, data-driven basis, completely devoid of the emotional hooks your marketing has always relied on? Agility requires not just adapting to changing customer behaviors, but also redefining who or what our customer even is. It demands that we build operational and strategic frameworks that can cater to both human emotional drivers and the cold hard logic of machines. Today, we’re at Forrester CX Forum East in Brooklyn, and we’re gonna talk about a fundamental shift in the customer journey, the rise of the AI
[00:00:45] Greg Kihlström: agent as an influential, and in some cases, decision-making persona. This isn’t just about using AI in our marketing. It’s about marketing to AI. We’re gonna explore what it means when our brand’s message needs to be optimized not just for human perception, but for machine interpretation and evaluation. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Chuck, welcome to the show.
[00:01:40] Chuck Gahun: Thanks for having me, Greg. I’m looking forward to the discussion.
[00:01:42] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to, definitely to diving in, looking forward to the, the event, uh, today and tomorrow. Uh, before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Forrester?
[00:01:52] Chuck Gahun: Sure, sure. So I cover content management tech, commerce services, and strategy. So that means I’ve written and researched across not only content, but also how commerce strategies are being impacted as a result of content now and all of that, right? So I’ve authored Future of Content, Future of Commerce. I’ve written, you know, several pieces on content and commerce strategies in the age of AI. Uh, I’ve spent the last 25 years of my career in digital tech, so I’ve s- helped g- guided leaders through a lot of changes over the years, e-commerce, mobile, cloud, and now AI. So it’s been fun.
[00:02:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So yeah, let’s dive in and wanna start with, you know, uh, from the strategic standpoint and, and, and even just to ground our conversation, agentic AI is certainly being used a lot. There’s, there’s a lot of people talking about it and, uh, and things. How do you define it, and, uh, you know, how do you define it in this context, and, you know, is this simply an evolution of SEO for voice search and answer engines, or is it a fundamentally new type of audience that requires its own strategy?
[00:03:01] Chuck Gahun: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So I’m gonna give you multiple answers that all build upon each other. So the first one is, if you’re thinking about AI agents, I think what I would want listeners to take away is that the word you’re thinking about there is agency. What is the level of agency that this AI agent has? And I think that is a good barometer to start thinking about.
[00:03:23] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:03:23] Chuck Gahun: The official Forrester definition for an AI agent is an AI application that is tuned to act on behalf of an enterprise or an individual. It can perform tasks. It can make decisions. It can interact with data and other systems, but that’s really what it’s doing. And the keyword again there that comes out is autonomously.
[00:03:42] Greg Kihlström: Mm. Yeah.
[00:03:42] Chuck Gahun: So agency, autonomy, what is the level of autonomy that exists in AI agents? And there’s a spectrum there that I’ll talk through a little bit more detail in a few minutes to also orient, uh, the listeners. Uh, how is AEO and SEO, like, is this just another form of SEO? Not quite. AEO does a lot more than just SEO. There’s a… Think about information architecture, topical depth of your content. Think about third-party sentiment. AEO is really curating and pulling all of that to create what are the, the, the metrics that are driving answer engines and how to optimize content for answer engines. So it’s a little bit more than just SEO. Fundamentally, though, I think there’s a duality that exists between human consumers
[00:04:28] Chuck Gahun: and AI agent consumers. So if you start thinking about it that way, you know, there’s a, there’s a whole host of things that are different. We’re d- driven by emotion. They’re obviously machines, so they’re driven by logic.
[00:04:41] Chuck Gahun: We’re shaped by identity, like who we are as individuals, and they are shaped and built by value, like what is the value th- or outcome they can achieve, right? That’s how we’ve engineered them. We are influenced by trust and relationships. They are influenced by trust and context, hence the AEO storyline, right? We browse in deterministic experiences. So what’s a deterministic experience? Think about a navigation menu on a website. It asks you to go in a very deterministic path, right?
[00:05:10] Greg Kihlström: Mm. Yeah.
[00:05:10] Chuck Gahun: Well, AI agents, answer engines, these are all non-deterministic experiences, meaning they’re actually building responses on published content, gathering third-party sentiment, and creating an FAQ even, a dialogue back and forth with consumers. I’m sure many of our listeners, including yourself, are probably engaged in all of that.
[00:05:28] Greg Kihlström: Right.
[00:05:29] Chuck Gahun: We are limited by how much we can hold from the cognitive load perspective. Mm, they’re limited by context windows, and we reason from lived experience. They’re looking for patterns, right? Uh, and finally, you know, we orient around tasks. We are human beings. We work a certain amount of hours, and I think this is the part that’s really starting to shift and change how AI agents are coming into content and commerce, which is that they’re oriented around outcomes and can work 24/7.
[00:05:57] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:58] Chuck Gahun: So if you start thinking about that in a- all of what I’ve just shared in the bigger s- the larger spectrum, you start to see… … this agentic AI era offers a new promise for businesses and consumers, a lot of opportunity.
[00:06:11] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, it seems like the, to simplify it as kind of the next level of SEO, for instance, it’s, it’s kinda shortchanging the entire process. To your point, you know, there’s, there’s a very different thing that we’re optimizing for, and, and it’s, it, it’s split more than it ever has, right? I mean, SEO felt a little closer to based on human intent, right?
[00:06:37] Chuck Gahun: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Chuck Gahun: Absolutely.
[00:06:38] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:06:38] Chuck Gahun: Absolutely. And SEO is, just to be clear, SEO is still a thing. It’s-
[00:06:42] Greg Kihlström: Right.
[00:06:42] Chuck Gahun: … might be starting to lose its dominance a little bit. However, we still advise a lot of clients on SEO. That’s, it’s an important part of their business to this day.
[00:06:51] Greg Kihlström: Right, right. Yeah, they don’t-
[00:06:53] Chuck Gahun: And it will continue to be.
[00:06:53] Greg Kihlström: They don’t get rid of things. They just keep adding more, right? (laughs) So that’s- (laughs)
[00:06:57] Chuck Gahun: Right, exactly, and that’s, you know, big tech growth. That’s how it goes. (laughs)
[00:06:59] Greg Kihlström: Exactly, exactly. So, um, you, your work mentions, uh, combining human emotions and machine logic, which, you know, can seem paradoxical, but how should a brand strategist begin to reconcile the need for this compelling emotional brand story, which still resonates with, with the humans, with that need for the structured machine-readable data that you talked about, you know, the, that GEO and, and, and AI agents would need?
[00:07:29] Chuck Gahun: Yeah. Good question. I think what’s really transpiring here for brand marketers specifically and brand leaders is, as agents and AI training crawlers are coming to your website, they’re looking for semantically rich content. They’re looking for… Think about those detailed PDP pages. The great example I like to give is, remember those old school B2B sites that had, like, all of those specs about the parts?
[00:07:56] Greg Kihlström: Right. (laughs) Yeah.
[00:07:56] Chuck Gahun: That is a gold mine for these agents.
[00:07:58] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:07:59] Chuck Gahun: However, on the other side of things, us as humans, we are persuaded by emotional storytelling. So think about those beautiful JavaScript overlays and how you scroll through, and it’s just invoking your emotions to get you to purchase a product. I think what we’re seeing here is once we realize that that emotional storytelling is not exactly what the machines are looking for, they’re looking for semantic richness, you start to see the rise of this dual optimization happen, where there are experiences for humans and separate experiences for machines.
[00:08:30] Greg Kihlström: Mm.
[00:08:31] Chuck Gahun: And in that motion, what’s happening with digital experiences right now, and a lot of marketing leaders that I advise are investing money in this, and our data shows this too, uh, is that they’re looking to redesign their current properties to be much more emotional storytelling for humans, and then create specific experiences for machines to gather the content and data, hence some of this AEO optimization storyline that’s coming into play. That’s why the investment there, right? And these agentic channels, look, at the end of the day, they’re emerging. It’s white space. Many of the inbounds I take around agentic commerce, as an example, people don’t wanna miss the boat. That’s the thing, right?
[00:09:13] Chuck Gahun: They would, they, they feel like this is the Amazon moment happening again, and they wanna make sure that they are making the right moves early on.
[00:09:21] Chuck Gahun: Especially since these models, well, since these models are now being released so quickly, but also, they’re training, like, they’re training a lot faster now. So you can put out content and impact your brand and your product a lot faster than it was, uh, I would say a year ago.
[00:09:37] Chuck Gahun: And so the whole game is changing on that.
[00:09:39] Greg Kihlström: Well, and so let, then let’s talk about operationalizing that, ’cause, you know, in addition to the, the models changing all the time, it feels like there’s a new protocol that gets released every day, but I, I may be (laughs) overstating that, but-
[00:09:53] Chuck Gahun: (laughs) Yeah.
[00:09:53] Greg Kihlström: … it happens, it happens often enough. So, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot to, to kinda wrap your, your head around. So what, what are maybe the practical first or second steps that a marketing ops or CX team should take to make their brand agent-friendly?
[00:10:08] Chuck Gahun: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, uh, research that I just released recently, and I think maybe last week, it published. So we’ve been talking a lot about visibility with agents, right?
[00:10:19] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:10:19] Chuck Gahun: You know, make sure that they, robots.txt, and they can crawl your site and all of that, and as I set, embarked on this research this year, I, we wanted to push the envelope and say, like, “How are we going to design content strategies to target AI agents?” That’s really where we need to go next.
[00:10:34] Chuck Gahun: And what we found through the research is that agents are looking for three things. They’re looking for context, they’re looking for fluency, and they’re looking for trust.
[00:10:42] Chuck Gahun: So as we start talking about operationalizing this, what should a brand or a marketing leader be thinking about? Well, we’ve already got the baseline. Regularly audit, tune, measure website schema, do that-
[00:10:54] Chuck Gahun: … buy a tool that does that, have a (laughs) services partner that does it for you-
[00:10:58] Chuck Gahun: … whatever works for you. But then beyond that, start thinking about, what do you want to own in this space? Do you want to have a horizontal or a vertical content strategy? Meaning, do you have, do you wanna own depths in a product, or do you wanna own breadth in your sector? That is two different games that you would then be pushing content into market out for. So once you figure that out, then how do you give an agent context and fluency? Well, context is obviously about third-party sentiment and all that. You have to make sure you’re tracking it. You make sure that you are publishing content that targets that. Beyond that, what does fluency mean? Fluency is about, you know, I feel, I can’t help but feel like we got really creative in certain places with product names
[00:11:43] Chuck Gahun: and descriptions and what a brand does, and it’s an eco-friendly brand. Like, agents don’t, they need to be able to reconcile you within your sector in the same language that everybody else in your sector is using.
[00:11:57] Chuck Gahun: So that creativity needs to be standardized. That’s, that’s the fluency piece. And then the trust thing is, like, you have to keep publishing the content regularly. They have to know that you are a topical source that they can keep coming back to. And that trust not only embodies in how your brand is represented, but it also, uh, e- embodies in how the agents are then publishing on top or building responses on the published content, which I’ve just started thinking about recently. Which is, you know, it used to be the, the last mile used to be you would publish content on a website or a mobile app. That was the end of the road.
[00:12:33] Greg Kihlström: Right. (laughs)
[00:12:34] Chuck Gahun: That’s like come back now. It’s like the middle of the road and this, this is some of the research I’m doing now, which is agents are taking that published content and then are building the experience, a non-deterministic experience, on top of that. So they are essentially generating the response. I think we all know this, but when you start thinking (laughs) about it that way, you realize like, oh my gosh, my published content is not at all what a consumer might see.
[00:12:59] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and ’cause to your point, you know, you, you use the term eco-friendly. So what is that? It’s, you know, I know what that means to me as a human. Maybe, maybe there’s some different, you know, semantic differences between one human to another, but generally speaking, it adheres to some, you know, some feelings and some, some stats and, and things like that. But to an agent-
[00:13:21] Greg Kihlström: … it’s gotta be very like-zeros and ones, right?
[00:13:25] Chuck Gahun: Exactly.
[00:13:25] Greg Kihlström: So what, what does eco-friendly has to mean other attributes, right?
[00:13:29] Chuck Gahun: And then in the sector. Eco-friendly could mean different things for different verticals and different types of products and goods and services. And so when you start thinking about it that way, you realize that you have to be really semantically clear on what information you’re putting out for AI agents.
[00:13:46] Chuck Gahun: And that has become a huge focus area for brands and marketers. I mean, we’re calling it, you know, we have B2B and B2C marketing. We’re starting to call this, this is definitely a B2A marketing strategy now.
[00:14:00] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:01] Chuck Gahun: Like, we have to start marketing to them. It is what everyone is starting to focus on just because honestly, the real reason why this is happening, just to call a spade a spade, is that answer engines are intermediating so many consumer journeys. Like, we think about retail, that’s the easy one. But think about healthcare.
[00:14:24] Chuck Gahun: Where do I find the closest doctor? And then that ends in some kind of a find the physician, go to the doctor, ends in some kind of a transaction. Then you think about travel and hospitality.
[00:14:34] Chuck Gahun: You think about e- it’s even playing out in government space, government spaces. So, like, it’s touching so many different verticals ’cause it’s making, helping consumers get the answers faster.
[00:14:44] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.
[00:14:45] Chuck Gahun: And that’s where the game is changing, especially on specific types of products and specific types of services.
[00:14:51] Greg Kihlström: I mean, do you think it’s… I mean, I’ll just give my own thoughts here, but, you know, I, I feel like it’s helping brands to quantify sort of the, the squishy, like, unquantifiable things that they’ve said, but it was difficult to back up. Like, do you… In other words, do you think it’s a good thing that brands are being kind of forced to quantify and, and characterize in very, kind of almost binary ways what their, what their brand stands for?
[00:15:20] Chuck Gahun: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I’ll give you a very discrete example of this, which was so cool. And I was, so, so I was talking to a brand about this as part of this research, and they said, “Look, we have lived this firsthand. We released a product last year. It was R1. It was essentially a flop. We got so many bad reviews about it all over the web. We got, like, buyer beware. So we hired an agency and we said we need to optimize our content. Like, we need to solve this for our brand. It’s impacting our brand. What do we do?” And wouldn’t you know it, what they did was on their owned property, they designed FAQs as they released the next version of the product, FAQs to target the negative sentiment-
[00:16:03] Chuck Gahun: … and how they have addressed it so that the training crawlers would come and get that as well.
[00:16:08] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:16:08] Chuck Gahun: And sure enough, three or four months later, as you start running searches on their product, they showed it to me. And it literally, it says exactly what you would want it to say as a consumer that’s looking to buy the product, saying, “This product previously had negative reviews, buyer beware, these sentiments back in this timeframe. Since then, there’s been a new product that’s been released. It’s res- it’s receiving better reviews.” And, you know, it sort of gives you the, the sources it’s getting it from, including their own site.
[00:16:35] Chuck Gahun: And so you see, like, that is an example of how they are targeting. And to your question, yeah, it’s putting brands into the space where they have to address what’s happening with their product, their services, and market, and how consumers are perceiving it.
[00:16:51] Greg Kihlström: Doing that across multiple teams, you know, CX, marketing, product, IT, you know, how do you recommend that leaders do the, you know, do, do this cross-functionally? Because, you know, it’s, it’s, they’ve been used to doing this, you know, one way, you know, maybe a couple ways over, over the last, you know, 20 years since the, the internet. So, um, you know, what, what does this look like when it’s done well cross-functionally?
[00:17:18] Chuck Gahun: I’ll give you one example that is a very powerful cross-functional example, and then I’ll give you another example in how, how leaders should perhaps think about content and content strategy in this era, because they’re both a little connected. The, the example that I got from General Motors, and I was talking to their head of search earlier this year, and his, we published this in the research. Their story was very interesting. They wanted to use answer engines to help consumers find more cars. But let’s be real. They don’t sell cars. The dealers sell the cars.
[00:17:49] Greg Kihlström: Right. (laughs)
[00:17:51] Chuck Gahun: So what they did was they embarked on a cross-functional NGM, cross-market, dealer-powered optimization strategy for cars, offers, pricing, availability, all of it across answer engines. So that’s, they did that together in, in concert. … how did they really achieve the scale so that it started impacting their bottom line? And they wouldn’t tell me what the bottom line impact was, but-
[00:18:18] Greg Kihlström: Right.
[00:18:19] Chuck Gahun: … I got the sense of where. It was relative, it was quite positive, but he wouldn’t tell me how much. Uh, but the, the thing I’m trying to point out there is, as they went about that, what they did was they also did what we call earned authority.
[00:18:32] Greg Kihlström: Mm.
[00:18:33] Chuck Gahun: So they also bought advertising to amplify that across paid channels and tha- both of those strategies put together has given them more of a foothold on answer engines when you ask questions about General Motors or it’s even consumers are curious about a, a GM car.
[00:18:50] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:18:51] Chuck Gahun: It’s a very curated response that the answer engine will give. So that’s a, that’s the operational, operationalizing it across teams.That’s what good looks like.
[00:19:00] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, teams and car brands and-
[00:19:03] Chuck Gahun: Yeah.
[00:19:03] Greg Kihlström: … and all that, right? Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:05] Chuck Gahun: Yeah. And then the other one that’s more content strategy related, which is if you start thinking about, you, you know, your, the, your question about how should teams be thinking about operationalizing something like this, I, I think we’ve been stuck in this world which is that, you know, I was talking to Harman International. They, they own JBL.
[00:19:24] Chuck Gahun: And their sentiment was, you know, when you start thinking about content strategies for answer engines, why would we promote content that basically talks about good headphones for runners? That is a very crowded space. So they have deployed literal teams across their org to think through content strategies that help them think about white spaces.
[00:19:53] Greg Kihlström: Mm.
[00:19:55] Chuck Gahun: Which is how might a consumer search for this? And even if they do search for it and we do surface it, how do we draw the consumer to the next step into a white space re- area rather than a crowded headphones for runners, you know, sweat waking, all of that?
[00:20:10] Chuck Gahun: How do we pull them to, to the other parts of our product? And that’s an example of where they have teams deployed, you know, around the country thinking through content and content strategy, in this case for headphones.
[00:20:23] Chuck Gahun: It’s pretty cool.
[00:20:23] Greg Kihlström: Well, and that, and that still seems like something humans (laughs) could do, could do well as opposed to the agents themselves.
[00:20:33] Chuck Gahun: Exactly.
[00:20:33] Greg Kihlström: That’s great. So let, let’s talk a little bit about measuring, uh, measuring and proving value certainly. You know, I feel like I’m, I’m sure you’re hearing the same, but you know, e- everyone seems to be asking to prove the ROI this, this year. (laughs) You know, like last year it was all about experimentation. Now there’s a lot of, you know, the, the bill’s come due so to speak. Um, you know, what, what’s the business case for investing in this now and, you know, how can a marketing leader, you know, connect optimizing for AI agents to things like, you know, whe- whether it’s revenue, market share, things like that?
[00:21:09] Chuck Gahun: Interesting you ask this because just in the last two weeks, there have been acquisitions and build and buys like, uh, we have, uh, Contentful was-
[00:21:19] Chuck Gahun: … acquired by Salesforce. We have Sitecore acquiring a company called Scrunch, which is doing a lot of AO optimization and we even have Optimizely building out their own A- AO platform. And what everyone’s going and Google is releasing insights on their dashboard- on Merchant Center. What everybody’s starting to go after is this concept of like data and insights for answer engine so you can understand, connect the prompts to the performance of your content basically. And as this start, this space starts to mature, what we’re gonna start finding is not only that marketers are gonna be able to target it better, but through the measurement and being able to get some of these insights, we’ll be able to start connecting it to ROI and connecting to larger content programs. So what is the business case? What should you be doing as a marketing leader around this to build the case? This is a traditional content strategy business case in really what would be more of a white
[00:22:18] Chuck Gahun: space frontier for your brand. I think that’s the best way to put it. And when you step back and you say like, “What is required to do this?” The advice that we’re giving folks actually is, this is not about tech implementations. This is about taking the tech you have and building your content strategy, your information architecture, your topical, you might have to republish content. Like, build a content program. That’s the business case. It’s not for tech investment. It’s more for a broad content program that drives measurable results for your business over time, and that also gives you a chance to see how your content’s performing for machines versus humans in the broader strokes of your brand, like over time, right?
[00:23:02] Greg Kihlström: So I mean, is this, uh, I mean, is it kind of a distraction to use some of these t- I mean, mar- marketers and we all love our acronyms and everything like that, but you know, is this a, is this a new persona then? Is this a, like, what’s the right way to think of it without getting kind of bogged down to your point in the, the tech investment part of this and, and you know, it sounds like it’s almost just a, another nuance to content strategy as, as-
[00:23:29] Chuck Gahun: Yeah.
[00:23:29] Greg Kihlström: … as you characterize it.
[00:23:30] Chuck Gahun: It’s a new, nuance of content strategy, and I think one way to think about it is that you, yeah, you have a new, I don’t know how to say this, like, s- segment or new persona definitely that’s a machine.
[00:23:40] Chuck Gahun: You have a lot of human personas, sure, and now you also have a machine persona. And over time, my fundamental belief to the research as I’ve just wrapped it up and then I’m embarking on the next set of research on this, is that we are going to fundamentally have different types of agents over time.
[00:23:57] Chuck Gahun: And through that, we’re gonna need to build different types of agentic strategies. So I’ll give you one to tease and just leave the audience-
[00:24:04] Chuck Gahun: … thinking with about which is a question that I ask in my, in, in the research paper is, would you ever design a agentic loyalty program or a specific drop- … on an agentic-only channel, like Nike does drops all the time on their mobile app, right?
[00:24:24] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:24:24] Chuck Gahun: Would you ever do something like that and build hype for humans, but it was only available in agentic channels?
[00:24:30] Chuck Gahun: Meaning my consumer agent can go find that, but I-
[00:24:35] Chuck Gahun: … cannot go find that as a human on a mobile app or a digital experience. So like-
[00:24:40] Chuck Gahun: … you, I think over time, we’re gonna see very quickly that marketers are gonna start targeting specific strategies like that, using content-
[00:24:49] Chuck Gahun: … to build demand before humans can maybe browse it emotionally.
[00:24:54] Chuck Gahun: That might also be another indicator. And then you can see how then that transfers into loyalty, which is also very interesting. Like, how do you get them coming back? Like, if I’m a loyal customer, Google already is thinking through that in their agentic commerce spread of how to add loyalty into their merchant center. And so if you think about that, then well, if you know that I’m a loyal customer to whatever brand, would you surface things that only my agent can get to- through that loyalty?
[00:25:21] Chuck Gahun: And so you see this, this world is emerging. So when you say- when you asked me, like, how should a marketer be thinking about this? Is this just another buzzword? It- it is … Uh, you- we have to start thinking about standing up the whole host of machine personas over time.
[00:25:34] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:34] Chuck Gahun: And how you wanna target them. And that’s gonna be different. The cool part is, that’s gonna be different for every brand, it’s gonna be different for every product family, right?
[00:25:43] Chuck Gahun: Like think about product, like jackets that are purchased and y- used in the North- in North America versus AMIA versus APAC. Like, you can start thinking about how you target differently in different regions. There’s a lot there.
[00:25:57] Greg Kihlström: (laughs) Definitely. Well, yeah, and I guess, you know, to- to that end and, you know, talking a little bit about the- the future as- as we wrap up here, we’re still early days, you know, and, you know, as I mentioned, you know, there’s still protocols and updates to protocols coming out every- every week or so. But what does a mature agentic commerce ecosystem look like? You know, what does … You know, I- I know you touched a little bit on it just then, but, you know, what- what do we- what should we be expecting in the, you know, months to come?
[00:26:28] Chuck Gahun: Two major lenses to look at it from, owned environments and non-owned environments. So the agentic commerce ecosystem is going to be stood up in both of those facets. So you’re gonna have more and more chatbots, you’re gonna be able to do more on these chatbots on your owned properties.
[00:26:46] Chuck Gahun: And then there is this idea that we’ve been talking so much about, distributing your content for answer engines, AI agents. They’re gonna come and get it. You’re gonna push it. All of that’s gonna happen. That’s the other half of agentic commerce.
[00:26:58] Chuck Gahun: Over time, you’re gonna find that we’re go- we’re gonna get to a point where the thing that’s really gonna be holding us back is consumer trust and the payment protocols.
[00:27:08] Greg Kihlström: Mm.
[00:27:09] Chuck Gahun: We just released metrics yesterday. In fact, one of my colleagues, Lily, who covers payments, shared with us that, you know, uh, released research basically saying that consumers are very- relatively apprehensive to be sharing their payment details-
[00:27:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:27:26] Chuck Gahun: … on any of these. And it’s for all the reasons that you would expect.
[00:27:29] Greg Kihlström: Right.
[00:27:29] Chuck Gahun: They’re worried about fraud. They’re w- worried about liability. 44% of consumers are saying, “Well, if I am engaged in a commerce task on an answer engine and something goes wrong, who are you gonna hold liable?” And 44% are saying, “The answer engine.” Think about that. You buy something from a retailer’s website. Something else shows up on your door. Who are you gonna hold liable?
[00:27:50] Chuck Gahun: So there’s- we’ve gotta cross some of these trust thresholds. How will the agentic commerce ecosystem eventually evolve? I think eventually we will get to some motions of autonomous agentic commerce, back to where we started from, agent to agent interactions. And what that looks like is I have delegated an agent to refill my toner cartridge. When it goes to a certain point, it gets below a certain threshold, the printer sends a signal. I have authorized it once. After that, it has its own autonomy.
[00:28:22] Chuck Gahun: So every time that goes low, it refills it. I do not authorize it again. Now, if I were to keep authorizing it, which is kind of where we are now with Amazon’s Buy For Me, where you can authorize an AI agent on Amazon to go buy a shirt or whatever product you want when it hits a certain price. That’s it.
[00:28:38] Greg Kihlström: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:39] Chuck Gahun: That is semi-autonomous in our mind, which is that we are authorizing the agent to do something very specific, and when it’s done with that task, it’s complete. But on the printer, in- the ink cartridge example I gave you, it had an objective, an outcome. Don’t ever let the cartridge get empty. So it’s gonna keep operating against that, and that is what works for, like, full autonomy. Where have we seen this so far? Honestly, not many places. It’s actually interesting because in B2B, we have seen some motions of this happen, where … Think about, like, intelligent factories wanting to refill. We’ve started to see agent to agent communication to just keep factories running. That’s starting to pop up. I- I think over time, that will probably take off, uh, bigger and bigger, but that’s kind of
[00:29:24] Chuck Gahun: long answer to your question, but yes, uh, the ecosystem will evolve in many ways.
[00:29:28] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And- and let’s- let’s talk a little bit about the- the risks as well. And, you know, you mentioned some of the- the lack of trust, and I mean, you know, that brings me back to the early days of eCommerce where people didn’t wanna type their credit cards in, but, you know, I- I feel like some of that’s gonna hopefully be, um, you know, all the- the risks will be mitigated. Um, but, you know, what are the primary, like, pitfalls or maybe unintended consequences that brands should be wary of now, you know, as they’re- as they’re beginning to adopt AI agents?
[00:29:59] Chuck Gahun: I think brands have a lot to consider. You know, we- I- another track of research that I just completed is something called Distributed Commerce Strategy. So as businesses are thinking about this, they need to be thinking about a lot. This isn’t like, let me just turn on my product catalog and let the answer engine get it. You have to think about things like, can this make money? You have to model your full cost to serve. Think about returns. Eventually, you’re gonna be thinking about things like ad fees. What is it? What is the content overhead? What does a content program look like that we discussed? Then. Can you meet each channel’s target content requirements? Question mark. There’s a difference between Google UCP and OpenAI’s ACP, and yes, you have to optimize your content differently for both. Is this something you want to do? I don’t know. Is it gonna be profitable? I don’t know. That’s…
[00:30:44] Chuck Gahun: You have to do the math. Does your strategy flex for local and global? Like, we found so many irregularities in the research for global regulations. So if you’re a global operator, there’s a lot in play on how you’re gonna bring agentic commerce or your products to market-
[00:31:02] Chuck Gahun: … on agentic channels globally, right? And then we’ve talked about tariffs, inflation, you know, wars, and so on. But like, what are the economic shocks and can you survive that? Like, do you have cash on hand? Can you flex quickly? Like, how tight is your OPEX budget running all of this? So those are some of the things that we are guiding leaders thinking through. In fact, we- we’ve got a workshop here ca- around agentic commerce that’s diving into that, so folks can consider without just… You know, we’re calling it strategy over urgency. A lot of leaders are feeling like they’re being left behind, but we’re guiding leaders to say, “Be more strategic in what you’re doing, what products you’re selling on what channel, and why, so that you can remain profitable as we go through this.”
[00:31:46] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, sounds great. Well, Chuck, thanks so much for joining today. I know, um, Forrester CX Forum East is kicking off in a little bit here today. What are you looking forward to most?
[00:31:57] Chuck Gahun: I am most interested in the keynote on consumer trust. That is, we’ve got some data that’s being unlocked there, and I’m really excited to see how we’re gonna close that gap in the age of AI. Because I fundamentally believe that once we start closing in on that gap, AI and the adoption of AI, especially agentic AI, is going to skyrocket.
[00:32:17] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, love it.
[00:32:18] Chuck Gahun: Yeah.
[00:32:19] Greg Kihlström: And last question for you, uh, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:32:25] Chuck Gahun: Good question. (laughs) So I tend to read before sunrise. That’s something that I started doing a couple of years ago. So before the day begins, it’s still dark outside, I start my day by learning. I have, like, personally curated feeds and the podcasts that I listen to. So then I usually go to, go for a run or go to the gym to let it marinate. But that’s generally how I keep up with what’s happening in our crazy AI world.
