With agentic AI search engines driving consumer purchasing decisions, retailers are competing for the discovery moment in a layer of engagement they did not build and that they cannot control. 

Most retailers are not ready for the advent of agentic search, explains Vadish Shetty, VP of global marketing at Rezolve Ai, in an interview with Inside Retail’s Amie Larter for her podcast series Retail Untangled. 

“And the ones who think they are are not really looking at the right dashboards. Maybe they are looking more at the old and the legacy dashboards.” 

As a marketer for 20 years, he learned to “own” that discovery moment. “We looked at how we optimise a page, how we ranked a keyword, and how we controlled the funnel. That playbook has just retired in the last 18 to 24 months, pretty much in real time.”

During those two years, agentic search’s eclipse of traditional SEO tactics has been dramatic. Independent evidence of changing behaviour is highlighted by Adobe, which reported an 800-plus percentage year-on-year increase in AI-driven traffic.  

Research from Rezolve Ai shows that AI and agentic commerce are projected to mediate about $5 trillion of the $30 trillion global retail industry. “These are massively big numbers, and retailers that I speak to in the region are still running campaigns for a world that is disappearing pretty rapidly in front of our own eyes. 

“They are not acting fast enough.”

The first warning sign

The most immediate warning sign a retailer is in trouble in this new era is when you ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation, and your brand never appears – or worse, it appears with inaccurate pricing and inventory. 

Addressing this requires accurate, comprehensive data. Typically, a retailer’s product data is structured well enough that when a consumer asks for information along traditional lines, they can find it. But when a consumer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini to recommend something in a category their brand needs to show up in, Shetty says the brand needs to appear confidently and accurately in the results. 

“That’s where a lot of retailers are focusing at this moment in Asia; the AEO aspect. That’s the new SEO, and the brands that are getting ahead of it are really using their product catalogue as the infrastructure.” Some of the conversations Rezolve Ai is having with retailers are around turning unstructured and fragmented catalogues into cleaner, agentic-ready data subsets, Shetty shares. 

“AEO is the new SEO. That’s a reality that all retailers have to accept.”

This means that retailers need to shift their mindset, he says: Stop trying to control the surface and start owning the data that feeds it. You can’t really dictate what an AI recommends, he explains, but you can absolutely determine if your brand is credible, structured, and a reliable source that the agent wants to surface. “Otherwise, it’s just going to be a massive fragmented mess the agent will quietly skip over. 

“You have to make your catalogue speak the language of the AI, and have real-time inventory, accurate pricing, and policy data that the agent can actually reason over. That’s the strategic imperative that we are hearing from retailers. Either you own the AI experience, or you become commoditised inventory.” 

If AI overcomes that primary relationship a consumer has with a brand during the purchase journey, everything the retailer has built around that direct relationship is at risk, says Shetty, unless they move really quickly. 

“Your brand just becomes a fulfilment utility. The loyalty, the trust, the emotional connection all get mediated by someone else’s model. That is an absolutely terrifying place to be as a retailer, and it is closer than what most retailers realise today.” 

Shetty cautions retailers to be aware that, from a retailer’s standpoint, shoppers are not going to a website to have a casual conversation. “They’re there to decide whether they need that white sneaker or a green dress, and they want to buy it.” 

Meeting the challenge

Shetty says many retailers that have successfully met the challenge have stopped treating AI as a department and started treating it as infrastructure. A retailer that looks at fragmented solutions – especially enterprise retailers running five to 10 to 15 disconnected tools – increases the total cost of ownership by about 30 to 40 per cent and creates data silos that make it impossible for any AI to deploy well. 

He sees retail leaders moving to unified platforms which connect discovery, guidance, and checkout into one single seamless flow. “They are also investing in data quality as a strategic asset.”

He says they are also deploying conversational experiences that complete transactions – “not just a chatbot that’s answering questions”. 

The ones who are getting it wrong are still holding on to the idea that an FAQ assistant can count as an AI strategy. While they have checked the box, they have not really changed the infrastructure’s architecture. They are holding on to siloed teams without a unified view of their entire customer journey.

“That is costing retailers massive revenue on a daily basis.”

• Listen to the podcast to hear Shetty explain how checkouts need to be structured to meet the new AI era, what he describes as “a new category of commerce infrastructure” retailers need to embrace; his advice to retailers starting to adapt to AEO; why using traditional language learning models wrapped around retail solutions will not cut it in the new era; and why many retailers’ current checkout infrastructure is already obsolete.