Harvard Business Review has been advising brands on how to adapt as AI agents start doing the shopping. Make product data machine readable. Build agent-facing infrastructure. Keep enough customer trust that people still share their data. Among the risks named is reduced insight into customer behaviour. The advice is practical and the risk is correctly spotted. The wording of it is worth pressing on. Reduced insight sounds like degradation. Less of what you had, recoverable at the margin with better first-party capture. Consider what actually happens. When someone browses your site you learn from every session. What they looked at, what they compared you against, what they abandoned in the basket, where they hesitated. That accumulated behaviour is what your merchandising, personalisation and lifetime value models run on. It is the asset the direct relationship produced. When an agent shops for them, you receive a transaction. The comparing happened inside the agent, and the agent kept it. So this is not degradation. It is relocation. The deliberation still exists, in the hands of a party that watched the customer weigh you against every competitor, which is a better vantage point than you ever had. You will keep receiving the orders. Somebody else will be keeping the reasons. https://hbr.org/2026/02/how-brands-can-adapt-when-ai-agents-do-the-shopping