Earlier this year, Mastercard completed a live agent-led transaction, allowing an AI agent to complete a purchase on a customer’s behalf. That moment should concern every brand director, because it’s the logical endpoint of a shift that’s already underway.
Rather than browsing aisles or scrolling through category pages, shoppers are starting to ask AI questions about what they should buy: which olive oil is best, which cereal is healthiest, what should I cook for dinner – and increasingly they’re getting a single answer back. By the time that response appears, your brand has either made the cut or it hasn’t. AI has filtered the market, weighed price, ratings and availability, and decided what’s worth considering. In effect, the basket is being built before the shop even starts.
This is a break from how grocery competition has worked for decades. Before, it was based on visibility: win shelf space, stand out in-store, rank highly in search, convert at the point of purchase. These mattered because they determined what shoppers could see and reach. AI breaks that model because it doesn’t browse – it filters and ranks. It doesn’t present options so much as curate outcomes, with comparison happening not in the mind of the shopper, but inside the AI.
The risk of invisibility
That creates a new kind of threat for fmcg brands: invisibility. A product can be well distributed, competitively priced and highly visible in traditional retail environments, yet still be absent from AI-generated recommendations.
The brands best positioned for this shift aren’t yours. Tesco Finest, Aldi Specially Selected and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference are built on what AI prioritises: consistent quality, clean product data, strong value perception and tight integration with retailer data. In an AI-mediated shop, those are decisive advantages.
The risk for branded fmcg is no longer simply losing space on shelf, it’s disappearing altogether.
This dynamic also reshapes loyalty, which no longer lives primarily in the shopper’s mind but in data. Programmes like Tesco Clubcard and Sainsbury’s Nectar generate behavioural signals that AI draws on when making recommendations. Loyalty, in this new context, does not live in habit and preference but in those signals.
This all adds up to a new stage in the decision journey: qualification. Before a shopper can choose you, the AI has to consider you. If AI cannot interpret or validate a product, it simply won’t recommend it – and in grocery, no recommendation increasingly means no sale.
That changes where brand building needs to happen. The winners will be brands that generate the kinds of signals AI can trust, not just stories that shoppers like. Because in an AI-shaped marketplace, preference only matters if you are considered in the first place. Grocery has always been a battle for visibility, but AI moves that battle upstream to the recommendation layer.
In that world, brands won’t lose at the shelf, they’ll lose before they’re even seen.
Nicola Nimmo is head of customer engagement at Cheil
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