If you are sitting on the sidelines wondering if AI platforms will change commerce, here are some great insights from Vivek Pandya Director of Digital Insights at Adobe. Vivek compares what’s happening now to the early days of Google Search and SEO as well as when Meta and other social platforms experienced explosive growth. Brands should view this as a significant growth opportunity and not just as another channel, first movers can gain significant market share.
Search engines rewarded brands that optimized for discoverability in an index. LLMs reward brands that make their information easy for AI systems to understand, retrieve, cite, and synthesize. Brands that do this early may gain a disproportionate advantage because LLMs tend to concentrate attention on a small set of authoritative sources rather than presenting pages of ranked results.
Here are some mind-blowing stats from Vivek’s interview:
- Explosive AI Traffic Growth: Traffic from generative AI platforms to retail websites has increased by 393% year-on-year
- Approximately 40% of consumers in the United States have utilized AI at some point during their buying journey over the past two years.
- A year ago, traffic from AI channels was underperforming other marketing channels by 38%. Today, this same traffic is outperforming all other marketing channels by 48%.
- Revenue per visit from AI traffic is 37% higher compared to other channels .
- Bounce rates have improved by 32% for these users, indicating higher engagement.
Despite these metrics, currently, about one-third of internet content is not machine-readable, highlighting a major opportunity for brands to optimize their structures for AI search.
Brands that want to win in Agentic Commerce will do well to focus on Discoverability, Experience and Purchase on the LLM platforms, that’s where consumers are making their buying decisions, by the time they go to your website they have already decided – but think of all the times the decided to go elsewhere!
Join me at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, beet.tv leadership session on Wednesday, June 24 at 2pm for a lively discussion on the future of Agentic Commerce with Devin Nagy Global Head of Digital, Diageo and Rajat Agarwal Global Commerce Lead at Accenture. See how first mover brands are capitalizing on the enormous audience of 3.8bn global LLM users of whom over 1.5bn use LLMs to discover and shop for products. Delivering end-to-end conversational commerce experiences on these platforms is critical to winning these consumers over.