Agentic AI Is Tipping the Balance of Power From Retailers to Brands

By Brett Banner, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Wayvia

E-commerce is at a genuine inflection point, but maybe not the one you think. The conversation about agentic AI has centered on how it collapses the sales funnel into a single prompt and what that means for brands and retailers.

That focus is obscuring a bigger and more fundamental change. For the first time in years, the balance of power between retailers and brands is tipping, and brands are moving into the driver’s seat.

Retailers have held the keys to the kingdom for two decades because they owned three things brands could not easily replicate. They had the closest customer relationship, the purchase data and the last click. That left brands in a fairly weak negotiating position, able to spend on advertising to generate demand but beholden to retailers’ decision-making at the vital point of purchase.

That grip is loosening, and Google may be pointing the way.

Google’s recently unveiled Universal Cart is a harbinger of the future online shopping experience. It is a persistent shopping cart that follows a shopper across search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. Items added from any of those surfaces sit in one place while Gemini tracks price history, watches for restocks and flags incompatibilities if, say, you’re buying a TV and cable together. Shoppers can check out with Google Pay or transfer the cart to a merchant’s own site. It runs on Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard released in January 2026 that is now expanding from the US into Canada and Australia, with the UK next.

Google is making a bid to become the place where shoppers go first, and that could fundamentally shift the relationship between customers and retailers. Instead of being the destination, retailers risk becoming just one fulfillment option among several.

Meanwhile, social commerce is opening another door. eMarketer projects US social commerce sales will pass $100 billion for the first time this year. TikTok Shop is growing at 48% a year, and is moving beyond beauty buys and low-cost apparel and into more expensive items like furniture.

In both cases, the customer’s relationship is with the platform they’re on and the brand they’re choosing, more than any retailer.

Retailers, for their part, are not standing still. Walmart, for instance, has embedded its own Sparky assistant inside ChatGPT, trying pull users into its own environment where it has control over account linking, loyalty and payment.

But as the market fragments further, brands that are not overly dependent on any single retailer are at an advantage. Consider one number in that light. Deloitte’s 2026 Retail Industry Global Outlook found that 81% of surveyed retail executives expect generative AI to weaken loyalty by 2027. That finding usually gets read as a warning to brands. Read it the other way. If loyalty erodes fastest for the undifferentiated, then the brands shoppers ask for by name become the scarce asset in an agent-mediated market.

Here’s how brand teams can ensure they’re among the winners as the balance of power in commerce shifts.

Diversify your channels. Wholesale, marketplace, social and agentic channels each need to carry meaningful volume on their own. Every additional channel is another surface an AI agent can index, and another place to absorb the shock when one platform changes its rules.

Build owned channels and owned content. Owned properties are where a brand controls the description of its own products, and that description is doing more work than it used to. For questions about what a product actually does and what it works with, owned pages are cited 50% of the time, the highest of any source type, according to data from GEO specialist Omniscient. A brand’s own site is the most authoritative source on the factual questions an agent asks before recommending something.

Ensure agents can pick you. Clean, complete product data is crucial for being selectable by an agent at all, and most brands are further from that baseline than they think. Kuli Kuli Foods audited its own AI visibility and found ChatGPT had catalogued more than 700 SKUs for a company that sells 25, because inconsistent naming and retailer-feed variations had fractured the brand into hundreds of weak signals. Getting your PDPs in order isn’t glamorous work, but it is more important than ever.

Get visibility across all platforms. Most brands still struggle to see unified sell-through across retailers, marketplaces and social storefronts in anything close to real time. That blind spot can allow false assumptions to go unchecked. For instance, Nulo Pet Food had long assumed it should drive most of its brand traffic toward Amazon. When the company looked at actual retailer preference among its shoppers and began routing them to their preferred choice, its mobile shopping share grew 44%.

For brands with real differentiation and a loyal following, the conclusion is straightforward. Retailers are about to find that they need those brands more than the brands need them.

About the Author:

Brett Banner is Senior Vice President of Strategy at Wayvia, an omnicommerce data and retail intelligence company that works with more than 2,000 brands and 32,000 retailers.