BCG's latest survey finds 75% of CPG companies still in AI pilots, more than half not measuring ROI, and agentic commerce already reshaping discovery. Here's what the data actually means for brand visibility.
Square launched a ChatGPT app and Claude plugin that let consumers discover sellers, browse menus, and place orders inside an AI conversation — with orders routing straight into existing Square POS systems, no new fees or setup. A milestone in agentic commerce moving from demos to everyday transactions: millions of small merchants just became addressable inside AI assistants overnight.
Salesforce's Shopper, Buyer, and Merchant agents are now GA, with direct product catalog integration into ChatGPT this month and Google AI Mode and Gemini to follow this summer — no third-party tools required. AI-channel distribution just became turnkey for the enterprise brands Salesforce serves, compressing the timeline for CPG brands to show up (or not) in agentic checkout.
Brand executives are moving from asking whether AI recommends their products to systematically measuring share of voice in AI search. The piece features TheoryNXT's KASPER — which runs up to 1,000 category-relevant queries a month to show CPG brands how AI describes and positions them — alongside the boardroom question now filtering down to every VP of marketing: "Are we being recommended by ChatGPT?"
AI now meaningfully influences up to 20% of consumer purchasing decisions globally. But that number conceals a much more urgent story. The gap between categories already transformed and those on the edge of disruption is widening fast.
A May Bizrate/EMARKETER survey finds 38.2% of US digital shoppers haven't used retail AI chatbots like Rufus or Sparky and aren't interested — the largest single response group — even as Macy's reports chatbot users spend 4.75x more. The reality check: adoption is uneven, but the engaged minority is disproportionately valuable, and it's exactly the audience brands need to win in AI recommendations.
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The Invisible Shelf is a free briefing for CPG brand leaders navigating the rise of agentic commerce.
AI shopping agents are becoming the new retail shelf, recommending, filtering, and buying on behalf of consumers. This publication tracks what matters.
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Cloudflare will change its defaults on September 15 to block AI training and agent access on ad-supported pages, while adding a dashboard showing how AI bots consume site content and evolving Pay Per Crawl into Pay Per Use. For CPG brands it cuts both ways: the infrastructure gatekeeping how AI agents see brand and product content is being rewired, and brands that want visibility will need to deliberately opt in.
GEO platform Profound launched Ads Studio, adding paid share-of-voice tracking and an ad relevance score for sponsored placements inside AI conversations, built on a 1.9-billion-prompt dataset. The AI-visibility measurement category is expanding from organic recommendations into paid — and eMarketer expects more vendors to follow as marketers demand proof before committing spend.
New PYMNTS Intelligence/Visa data shows AI shopping assistants are now retailers' single most-cited digital investment for the next three years (37%), displacing spend on cross-channel, stored payments, and mobile apps. With 47% of online shoppers already using AI in their last purchase and 64% expecting to use AI shopping agents within two years, agentic commerce is now a line item, not a thought experiment.
TheoryNXT examined more than 100,000 shopper queries across ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. Category-leading brands with strong retail distribution frequently fail to appear when AI assistants recommend products in their category. Today, TheoryNXT launches KASPER, which measures Brand Inclusion Rate and delivers prioritized Action Cards to fix it.