More than a quarter of consumers regularly use AI, according to a new report by FMI – The Food Industry Association, and that presents new challenges and opportunities to food and beverage manufacturers looking to get their products in front of shoppers.
Retailers in turn are ramping up development of AI chatbots, while top AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and others have released their own shopping assistants to capture consumers.
Meanwhile, AI agents performing tasks – such as shopping and placing orders – independently for their users, are becoming common.
Preparing for the agentic era
IBM offers suggestions on how CPG companies can organize and structure data properly to prepare for the era of AI agents.
According to IBM’s primer, embracing agentic commerce includes:
- Standardizing product data to ensure that it is readable by both humans and machines.
- Integrating open APIs (application program interface) to enable interactions from agents.
- Applying guardrails on how agentic AI can interact with consumers to maintain trust and regulatory compliance.
- Reevaluating SEO optimization to cater to AI agents as well as humans.
“As agentic capabilities evolve, these processes are increasingly multimodal, meaning they incorporate text, images, user history and structured data,” IBM wrote in a recent blog post. “This development is driving interest in generative engine optimization (GEO), which focuses on structuring product content so that LLMs [large language models, which power AI capabilities] and agents can interpret it efficiently.
“Instead of optimizing only for human searches, brands now need machine-readable product data, standardized attributes and clear metadata so AI systems can discover and use it.”
Disrupt your business
CPG companies must be willing to disrupt their own business in order to stay ahead in the world of agentic AI, according to a recent report from data analytics firm McKinsey & Co.
“This means rethinking traditional e-commerce strategies and revenue streams to embrace AI solutions that can improve product discovery, customer service and post-purchase experiences,” according to the report.
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Starting early will give food and beverage manufacturers a competitive edge “whether through AI-powered recommendation engines, chatbots for real-time assistance or smart shopping assistants,” according to McKinsey.
Businesses should focus first on building an intuitive API infrastructure that caters to AI agents, the report said.
“As AI agents increasingly influence consumer purchasing decisions, businesses must evolve to ensure their products and services are easily discoverable – not just by people, but by the agentic systems acting on their behalf. In fact, designing the ‘agent experience’ could soon become as important a consideration as the customer experience,” the report noted.
Browsing with AI
In addition to AI agents performing shopping tasks independently, AI companies are releasing web browsers to compete with Google Chrome and its integrated LLM Gemini.
OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, launched Operator in early 2025 and in July announced that it had fully integrated its agentic capabilities.
“Operator can be asked to handle a wide variety of repetitive browser tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, and even creating memes,” the tech company said in July. “The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up new engagement opportunities for businesses.”
Perplexity followed suit with its own native browser, Comet, in July. Both are angling to dethrone Google and its LLM, Gemini, which is fully integrated into the Chrome platform.
“This shift transcends traditional SEO, which stands to become less relevant in an agentic world. Instead, companies will need to understand and align with the data structures, preferences and decision-making logic of AI agents – while still preserving the emotional, brand-driven experiences that build trust and loyalty with people,” McKinsey noted.
The invisible shelf
CPG companies can prepare for agentic shopping by treating product data as the new packaging, according to the recent Google blog post “The invisible shelf: How CPGs can win agentic commerce in 2026.”
That means tagging products with information that highlights attributes important to consumers.
“For example, if your product uses sustainable packaging, an AI agent searching for ‘verified sustainable packaging’ won’t find it unless that information is structured and tagged,” according to Google.
The search giant predicts two primary interaction models for AI agents working on behalf of shoppers: consumer-to-merchant and merchant-to-merchant.
The consumer-to-merchant approach entails a shopper’s AI agent interacting with a merchant agent, checking products, finding the right match based on the consumer’s preference and making the purchase.
The merchant-to-merchant model involves two merchant agents interacting on behalf of the consumer.
“Say a consumer asks a retailer’s agent to purchase a product that’s out of stock or not in the catalog. Instead of losing the sale, the retailer’s agent could interact with other agents to source the item, complete the transaction, and fulfill the order, resulting in a happy consumer. Agents become collaborators, and brands capture more revenue,” Google explained.
