Discovery Isn't Finding

The brands that can't tell the difference are about to learn the cost.

I spent a decade at Visa watching money go from a plastic to invisible — friction disappearing from payments one tap at a time. Then two years at Meta watching algorithms get extraordinarily good at predicting what people wanted. We were removing friction everywhere, and calling it progress. Turns out, we were also removing something we didn’t know we needed.

Finding and discovering are not the same thing. The industry uses the words interchangeably but they are not synonymous. That confusion is about to cost brands everything.

Finding is what you do when you know what you’re looking for. You need jeans. You search for jeans. You find jeans. Transaction complete.

Discovery is what happens when you don’t know what you’re looking for — and then you do. You went in for jeans. You left with cords. Hadn’t considered them in about twenty years, but seeing the texture or color sparked a memory of autumn and being twelve and feeling a certain way. You didn’t find cords. You (re)discovered them. And that discovery changed what you wanted.

The difference isn’t semantic. It’s neurological. The brain processes expected and unexpected information through fundamentally different pathways. When you search for something and find it, you get a small dopamine hit from the reward of task completion. When you encounter something unexpected that turns out to be valuable, research suggests a 30-40% stronger response.¹ The surprise matters. The unexpectedness is the point.

This is why the product you stumbled upon stays with you longer than the product you were handed.

The cognitive science is unambiguous about what discovery requires.

Christian Busch, who’s spent years studying serendipity, identifies three necessary conditions.² All three must be present:

Agency. The discoverer must be actively engaged in the process.

Surprise. The outcome must be unexpected.

Value. The discovery must be recognized as worthwhile.

Remove any one and you don’t have discovery, you have something else. Luck is surprise without agency. Targeted search is agency without surprise. Noise is surprise without value. Delegate your agency and optimize against surprise — that’s the Agentic Commerce Bargain.

Agentic commerce disintermediates brand by design. You tell an AI agent what you need. The agent acts on your behalf. Products appear. The efficiency is extraordinary. But where is the agency? You delegated it. Where is the surprise? The agent optimised it away. What you’re left with is retrieval — sophisticated, preference-matched, increasingly accurate retrieval. Useful. But not discovery.

I watched a version of this at Visa. We talked about “top of wallet” — the card you reached for first. Physical wallets had a bit of friction built in: reaching past other cards, seeing alternatives, maybe a moment of reconsideration. Digital wallets collapsed it. Your default became invisible. Issuers rushed to claim the top spot because they understood once claimed, displacement was highly unlikely.

AI agents will be “top of wallet” for everything – “Top of Algorithm,” really. You won’t even see the wallet. You’ll delegate; the agent will execute. The brands it doesn’t surface don’t just lose the transaction, they aren’t ever visible.

I keep coming back to a phrase tech loves: “serve up.” We serve up recommendations. We serve up offers. We serve up content. The language frames discovery as something done to consumers. We serve. They receive.

But the science says discovery only works when it’s done by consumers. The value of discovery – neurologically, psychologically, and it turns out, commercially — depends on the discoverer being an active participant, not a passive recipient.

This isn’t a new tension. But agentic commerce makes it explicit in a way previous technologies didn’t. An algorithmic feed still required you to scroll, to stop, to engage. An AI agent doesn’t even require that. You delegate. It acts. Discovery becomes fully passive.

Which means, it stops being discovery at all.

The worship of signal has blinded the industry to the value of noise.

At Meta, we were steeped in the language of signal and noise. Signal was worshipped as the behavioral data that revealed intent. Noise was reviled as the random variation that obscured signal. Every optimization was meant to eliminate noise and promote signal.

But the science of exploration suggests this binary is false (as binaries typically are). Robert Wilson’s research shows humans don’t just use one mode of exploration, they use two.³

Directed exploration is what you do when you’re trying to learn something specific. You seek information about uncertain options because you want to make a better decision. This is the mode AI agents excel at supporting. This is signal-following.

Random exploration is different. It’s noise in the decision-making process, choices that aren’t perfectly optimized, and detours that don’t obviously serve the goal. It looks inefficient because it is. It’s also how we discover things we didn’t know we were looking for.

Agentic systems only support directed exploration. You tell the agent what you want. The agent finds options. There’s no mechanism for random exploration because random exploration looks like failure from an optimization standpoint.

But noise — what the industry treats as the enemy — is actually where serendipity lives.

Your Instagram algorithm can’t make the jeans-to-cords leap because cords don’t optimize for the engagement signal jeans created. An AI shopping agent won’t suggest cords because you didn’t ask for cords. The entire architecture is designed to eliminate the “noise” that random exploration depends on.

How did we get here, you ask?

Well, the people building the systems upon which commerce now flows are engineers. Their native language is binary — literally, zeros and ones. Signal or noise. Convert or bounce. Optimized or inefficient.

Their systems have no word for “valuable encounter that doesn’t convert for six months.” No metric for “planted a seed.” No category for the wander, the maybe, the interjection of kismet.

If your language can’t describe (or even acknowledge) serendipity, your system won’t deliver it. If your metrics are binary, your optimization will be too. And if you’re building the infrastructure the world runs on, you’ll build in black and white and there won’t even be room for grey.

Tech thinks in binaries and its systems are remaking everything in its image.

Every tech “advancement” has done the same thing: removed friction.

Catalogues to search. Search to algorithms. Algorithms to agents. Each step more efficient. Each step destroying a little more of what made discovery possible.

Friction is where discovery lives. The browse. The wander. The “while I’m here I might as well” moment. What tech calls friction is what most humans call experience.

Consider the good ol’ Sears Wish Book (Google it, kids) — the annual catalogue families used to spend hours with, dog-earing pages, circling items with pencil, negotiating wants around the kitchen table. That ritual was friction. It was also ownership, anticipation, and relationship. The act of circling made items yours in imagination before purchase.

Amazon’s infinite scroll is frictionless. It’s also meaningless. Nothing is ritualized. Nothing is anticipated. Nothing is yours until it arrives in a brown box you’ve already forgotten you ordered.

We’ve frictionlessed commerce to death. What we call convenience is actually the hollowing out of relationship and meaning.

The business case is just as uncomfortable.

Brand building creates durable memory structures. Performance marketing captures demand but decays quickly. The research says optimal investment is roughly 60/40 brand to performance.⁴ But for twenty years the industry has inverted this, seduced by attribution models that credit the last touch and hide the discovery that made conversion possible.

Performance marketing is a Ponzi scheme. It draws from a reservoir it doesn’t fill.

Nike just proved what happens when you drain it. They over-indexed on performance marketing and DTC, gutted their brand investment, and lost $70 billion in market value. The CEO was replaced. The company publicly reversed course back toward brand and the retailers they’d abandoned.[^5]

And yet consultancies and pundits are now telling everyone else to optimise for AI agents. Be “agent-preferred.” Make your catalogue machine-readable.

Brands are about to win every transaction and lose every relationship.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Hotels ceded customer relationships to online travel agencies. Now they pay the Discovery Tax: 15-30% commissions per booking, zero customer data, and more limited ability to build loyalty.

Artists gave discovery over to Spotify’s playlist algorithms. Now they earn less than a third of a penny per stream. 87% of tracks receive zero meaningful compensation. The platform decides who gets discovered. Artists get streamed…or they don’t.

Amazon third-party sellers receive orders from anonymous proxy emails. No direct customer contact. No relationship building. No loyalty. Amazon identifies bestsellers, then creates Amazon Basics to compete directly. The sellers built the demand. Amazon captured it.

Every wave of disintermediation follows the same sequence: new intermediary offers convenience, brands accept lower margins to maintain access, intermediary captures customer relationship and data, brand differentiation collapses into commoditized features.

Agentic commerce threatens to be more severe than any previous wave. Total autonomy capture. No direct customer contact. Price as likely primary differentiator. Brands won’t just be disintermediated, they’ll slip into Agentic Invisibility. Existing in datasets but not in human memory. Present in an catalogue of sorts, but absent from the consideration set. Technically available but functionally gone.

So what’s the answer?

While everyone’s current instinct is to ask: how do we optimize for AI agents? How do we become “discoverable” to the algorithms that will decide what gets bought?

This is the wrong question. It’s the question hotels asked about OTAs — and look where it got them.

The right questions are harder: How do we build discovery experiences that create loyalty agents can’t capture? How do we create customer relationships that exist outside the agentic layer? How do we make discovery the product, not just the pathway to purchase?

The brands that survive will be those who understand that discovery in and of its self is valuable — not as a means to transaction, but as the thing that creates meaning, memory, and attachment. They’ll build experiences that resist delegation. They’ll create friction that people actually want.

They’ll understand that efficiency isn’t the only thing consumers are optimizing for. That autonomy is a basic psychological need, not a luxury to be traded for convenience. What tech calls friction is often what humans call experience.

Some of this will start with the other d — delivery. Packaging, unboxing, and the moment something arrives: are touchpoints agents can't own, and most brands still treat as logistics. Some will mean making stores genuine destinations again — the Selfridges and Marshall Fields model, where shopping was never just buying.

But none of it works if you don’t understand the core distinction, discovery isn’t finding. The brands that can’t tell the difference are about to learn the cost.

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Footnotes

1. Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction-error signalling. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
   
   

2. Busch, C. (2024). Towards a Theory of Serendipity. Journal of Management Studies.
   
   

3. Wilson, R.C. et al. (2014). Humans use directed and random exploration. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
   
   

4. Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA.
   
   

5. Nike lost ~$70B market value 2024; CEO John Donahoe replaced by Elliott Hill, who committed to shifting from performance back to brand.