Readiness Is Not a Strategy
If your choosing fear and SAAS tools, I'm sorry.
There is a new generation of hypemen with big numbers, bigger promises, and tools to sell. Brands are being told that AI is about to take over how people shop. And, that if they don’t pay to get ready, they’ll become invisible. These services cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and more. They’re built on forecasts that say the agentic commerce market will be worth five trillion dollars by 2030.¹ The shift is real. The timeline has been inflated to create a sense of urgency for a new market of solutions.
The current reality is that less than one percent of online purchases involve an AI agent.² And, AI-referred traffic converts worse than most established channels.³ OpenAI hasn’t abandoned agent commerce, but it has shifted from frictionless buying to verified merchant protocols. Even the company building the most ambitious version of this new commerce ecosystem acknowledged it wasn’t ready for seamless checkout.⁴ Most AI-assisted purchases still end up on the brand’s own website anyway.
What I find fascinating (read: sad) is that the conversation about what to do about the biggest brand disintermediation of all time is being shaped almost entirely by people who don’t run brands. Instead, the discourse is shaped by tech companies, consultancies, platform companies, agencies, each with something to sell. The result is a set of solutions designed for the people selling them, not necessarily for the people buying them (or their customers). Ya’ll we’re choosing SAAS tools and fear over ownership and building.
Immune Response
When a system gets threatened, sometimes it produces responses shaped by its own constraints, not by the actual problem it’s facing. A solution that takes multiple quarters to produce returns is, for the most part, structurally unsellable in this market. So the market doesn’t produce it. It produces what it can sell: tactical responses wrapped in enough urgency to justify the spend.
The average CMO at a major US advertiser lasts 3.1 years.⁵ CEOs have maybe five before the board wants a different direction. The board reports quarterly. Nobody in the chain is rewarded for patience. The rational move at every level is to invest in whatever is visible, reportable, and defensible in a presentation. “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM” and all that. This isn’t a failure of any single role, it’s what the system selects for. And the system right now is selecting GEO agencies, a new wave of data transformation projects, and AI shopping assistants. Those are the things, like acquisition growth numbers before them, that fit inside a budget cycle and produce enough early signal to look like progress. These are what we refer to as “vanity metrics.”
Some of this work is genuinely useful. Structured data, clean product feeds, content that answers real questions? Yes, please. The problem isn’t the tools. It’s the frame. The moment when business as usual housekeeping gets packaged as strategy — with an acronym, a price tag, and a conference slot — it starts competing for the budget and attention that should be going to the actual structural strategic work underneath. Funding for delivery, owned channels, product investment, and the things that give someone a reason to seek you out by name when an agent would just as happily substitute you are not the focus. That work loses the budget competition every time, because it can’t be sold in a quarter.
What Could Go Wrong?
Ask Ballantine’s. It’s a mass-market Scotch. On purpose. Decades of positioning as accessible, affordable, everyday. Recently, the head of digital at owner Pernod Ricard ran an audit after learning that two-thirds of Gen Z were using LLMs to research products. What he found dismayed him: the data on his brands was incomplete or incorrect across the board.⁶ Pernod Ricard also owns Chivas Regal and The Macallan, and when they audited how major language models represented their portfolio, they found that Ballantine’s was miscategorized as a prestige product.⁷ The system couldn’t tell the affordable whisky from its expensive corporate siblings. That sounds like identity theft by algorithm. Decades of careful market positioning undone because a model conflated brands in the same portfolio.
Making yourself legible to these systems is necessary. Obviously. But it isn’t strategy. Being findable by a machine is not the same as being chosen by a human. When you do the tactical layer first and the structural, value layer second, you get a brand that’s perfectly visible to machines and doesn’t have what it needs to build awareness with people post-purchase, precisely when brand leverage matters most. When you do it the other way around, the tactical work becomes a distribution question, not a survival question. The order matters.
The Amex Delta card became one of the most successful cobrands in history because both brands decided the relationship was worth more than either side’s margin on any given transaction. That arithmetic requires believing the relationship compounds. The credit card industry believed it because they could measure it. Most consumer brands have never been forced to develop that discipline — but the ones building it now, quietly, while everyone else chases readiness scores, are the ones who’ll own the ground by the time the rest arrive.
The Real Cost
None of this is easy to say with a straight face unless I’m honest about what the structural work actually requires. Specifically, money allocated against returns you can’t measure for quarters. It requires data infrastructure that most mid-market companies are still building. Most of all, it requires conviction — someone in the room willing to defend investment when the buzz is on something else entirely. And, it requires doing two things at once: doing the tactical work, because you have to stay visible in systems you don’t control, while simultaneously building the thing that makes visibility possible and worth having.
Most companies already have underutilized structural assets like customer data, direct channels, product reputation, community knowledge. These opportunities are chronically under-resourced relative to the acquisition side, under-measured, and under-leveraged. Before the next GEO contract gets signed, the more useful question is whether the structural investments that already exist are working as hard as they need to for the coming reality and what it would take to make them compound.
The new leverage is not in whatever is getting shouted at you on LinkedIn, it is in asking a different question first: what do we already own that can help us in this leverage shift to post-purchase? What systems are going to enable? If you run a company, creating the conditions for that question to get asked — and acted on — is probably more valuable than anything on offer at the next conference.
Footnotes
McKinsey, agentic commerce market projection, 2026.
BrightEdge, “AI Shopping Skyrockets,” November 2025. eMarketer, December 2025.
Kaiser & Schulze, 973 ecommerce sites (Aug 2024–July 2025). Contentsquare, 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark.
Stripe, “Developing an Open Standard for Agentic Commerce,” September 2025.
Spencer Stuart CMO Tenure Study, 2026. S&P 500 average: 4.1 years; Ad Age top 100 advertisers: 3.1 years.
Gokcen Karaca, head of digital and design at Pernod Ricard, partnered with Jellyfish to audit LLM brand representation. Created “Share of Model” metric.
HBR, March 2026. Acar & Schweidel, “Preparing Your Brand for Agentic AI.” Pernod Ricard / Ballantine’s miscategorisation by major LLMs.
amazing analysis and POV! the part that bothers me the most is as you stated people building brands are not involved in this. what can go wrong right?