The convergence of Eastern platform innovations and data-rich Western retail ecosystems is reshaping AI-powered commerce, increasingly driven by agent-based decision-making, according to a new NielsenIQ report.
The report, The Commerce Revolution: Where East Meets West, explains how the shift is creating opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to better connect with customers with more personalized and relevant products and experiences.
The technology is ushering in an era where agentic AI does the heavy lifting for consumers and fundamentally changes how consumers discover products.
Quick and social commerce
Asia Pacific (APAC) consumers are rapidly adopting quick commerce – deliveries in about 30 minutes – and social commerce, where they buy products without leaving the social media app or website. Fifty-eight percent of APAC consumers have adopted quick commerce, and 59% have used social commerce.
In China, social media app Douyin/TikTok has broken into the top five purchase apps alongside major retail platforms such as Taobao, JD.com and Pinduoduo, according to NIQ.
Meanwhile, 69% of consumers in North America and 66% in Europe have never used quick commerce. Roughly 68% of Western consumers have never used social commerce, according to the report.
Conversely, Western countries are more advanced in leveraging retail media to enable hyper-personalized experiences, NIQ reported.
Advanced use of artificial intelligence is acting as “connective tissue between the two marketing approaches,” according to NIQ.
“What can appear today as fragmented channel growth is, in reality, the early stages of a connected global commerce ecosystem – with the consumer at the center,” the report noted.
The data analytics firm predicts that this combination of trends will build the commerce machine of the future.
“As this continues to develop, commerce will no longer be a set of discrete channels or functions, but rather an integrated, continuously optimizing, intelligent ecosystem,” NIQ said. “A competitive edge will belong to brands that can leverage best-in-class data to operate within this unified system – transforming that data into commerce intelligence that shapes how demand is generated, captured and measured.”
AI powering social commerce
The social commerce ecosystem is growing, particularly in the West, where roughly a third of consumers have made a social commerce purchase.
Those purchases are increasingly made with the assistance of artificial intelligence, according to NIQ.
“Within this environment, early signals of agentic commerce are emerging, in which AI is beginning to function as a decision engine – not only surfacing hyper-relevant products but interpreting consumer intent and prioritizing options,” according to NIQ. “While social platforms remain the primary layer for discovery and influence, agentic solutions are starting to shape how consideration sets are formed and, ultimately, how demand is generated within social commerce.”
This massive shift in how products are discovered requires updates to legacy methods of targeting, measurement and optimization, according to NIQ.
Agent-assisted commerce takes over the duties of product discovery, comparison and in some cases purchasing, thereby “collapsing the traditional purchase funnel across every channel and region.”
“Morgan Stanley estimates that agentic shoppers could represent $190 billion to $385 billion in US e-commerce spending by 2030, capturing 10% to 20% of total online retail. McKinsey projects the global opportunity at $3 trillion to $5 trillion over the same period,” NIQ reported.
Brave new world for manufacturers and retailers
Agentic commerce changes the game for manufacturers and retailers by upending traditional approaches to capturing consumers and getting them to make the purchase.
“Brands that invest now in structured product data, AI-readable attributes and cross-platform measurement infrastructure will be positioned to capture share,” NIQ explains. “Those who wait risk becoming invisible to the agents that will increasingly determine what consumers buy.”
