The Algo In Your Head

Chances are you have a complex conditional spending matrix in your brain.

Every conversation about agentic commerce assumes consumers have one mode, perhaps two. But, we contain multitudes.

At Visa, we divided spending into everyday and discretionary. Everyday is necessary stuff that barely moves when the economy shifts: groceries, utilities, gas, the commute. Discretionary is the stuff that contracts when things get tight: travel, certain kinds of dining out and entertainment, clothing. Different data patterns. Different risk profiles. Different businesses.

In research we often heard how consumers managed all this in their heads. People are running remarkably sophisticated internal systems. From a payments perspective, it meant one card for groceries because it maximizes cash back in that category. A different card for the big purchase that needs to float for a couple of months on the lowest APR. A third for travel because of the points program.

Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for describing the underlying mechanism: mental accounting. How we sort money into psychological buckets with different rules, different emotional registers, and a different willingness to optimize is going to be really important in this new agentic commerce age.¹

Even though money is fungible, consumers haven’t treated it as such. Historically.

The “Easy” Part

For everyday purchases — paper towels, dishwasher detergent, the stuff that runs on habit — the AI agent can be relatively straightforward. It does what consumers were already trying to do with their card-switching systems, it optimizes against a set of rules.

Recently, Google reintroduced “the invisible shelf” concept: when an AI agent shops on your behalf, it scans a surface and products no human ever sees. That “shelf” contains structured data, tagged attributes, and other machine-readable specs. If your brand isn’t built for that surface, the agent skips you entirely.²

For everyday brands, one move is obvious. Be legible. Compete on structured data. NielsenIQ data from March shows niche CPG brands gaining share because AI discovery rewards specificity. The brand that tagged “verified sustainable packaging” gets surfaced ahead of the mass brand with generic metadata.³ The invisible shelf favors that over scale. For now.

For discretionary purchases like travel, fashion, experience, or furniture; the agent is a different animal. It can find “hotels in Midtown under $300 with a gym and late checkout.” It can’t as easily understand that you don’t want to walk into a lobby and feel like the oldest person in the joint, wondering if the music has to be SO LOUD waiting to check in. Major chains like Hilton and Marriott have aggressively rolled out their own AI planning tools recently for exactly this reason: whoever owns the discovery layer owns the customer. They’d rather spend to keep that in-house than become a row in someone else’s database.⁴ That’s smart, but not a moat that’s guaranteed to last.

As usual, a binary is getting all the attention: commodity or luxury. But the terrain between everyday and discretionary is what’s super interesting. It is also where brand value actually lives.

What’s Your Pickle?

I buy all my pasta from a producer in Lari, a tiny hill town in Tuscany where I rented a house for a milestone birthday. Sure, I am absolutely fancy like that. AND, when I open my cupboard and see the yellow packaging I am transported to a hot July afternoon drinking Negronis with friends on a square. It’s dusty with semolina flour, you can see the pasta drying on racks, and view company’s bright yellow bags — the same color as the sunflowers surrounding the town — in the cool, dark store room you pass by on the way to your car.

An AI agent looking at my grocery list would see “dried pasta, 500g” and find me something excellent for way less money, probably delivered tomorrow. It would be solving a problem I don’t have. The value of this purchase is in a collection of memories I access every time I boil water.

In my family, we call this a pickle — the product you'd mourn if it disappeared, that you know more about than anyone in the room, that you ask for by name every time because settling feels like a small betrayal. Most of us have at least a few. It could be your toothpaste, your sneaker, your lipstick formulation, your choice of salt.

We all have our pickles. One of mine is bougie pasta. Others have different products or a category where you care disproportionately vs. the price point. My sister’s is pain relievers. Rachel was a very competitive athlete for many years then had a physical job as a firefighter and paramedic. She’s always had her share of aches and pains. Her coaches always gave her a particular pain reliever. Decades (and no small amount of R&D later), there is no veering from it, ever. Part drug, part talisman at this stage.

The pickle zone as I’m now calling it is everyday on the surface and discretionary underneath. The agent reads the surface. It misses everything below it.

New frameworks have to account for the fact that the pickle zone isn’t a property of the product. It’s a property of the person buying it. Paper towels are a commodity to me, Puffs Plus is a pickle. Toothpaste, socks, coffee, pens. For most people, these are autopilot. For someone else they are part of their identity. What this means is that almost no brand is categorically in any zone. Where you sit depends on who’s buying and why. Your customer base contains people in all three zones, and the ratio is your actual exposure map.

The Waitlist for Beans

Rancho Gordo is one of my favorite examples. They sell hype-worthy dried beans. Generally speaking, dried beans are a commodity item. Spanish gigante beans in olive oil and preserved lemon at a specialty store is one thing but a bag of dried beans? An agent would likely optimize right past them.

Rancho Gordo is going to do just fine. It has 30,000 Bean Club members, another 30,000 on a waitlist, and it moves 2.5 million pounds a year.⁵ Near-zero churn. Founder Steve Sando deliberately limits growth. When asked why he doesn’t go mainstream, his answer: I created my own club and made it worth belonging to. I suspect Steve is not rushing to ensure his beans are legible by agents.

These beans are a lot of people’s pickle, it seems.

Pickle Zones Aren’t Equal

My niece Abby is in her twenties. For her, most commerce is about cost and ease. That’s not a failure of taste, it’s a rational response to her economics. Her everyday zone is large. Her pickle zone is small and her discretionary bucket is fairly small as well. The agent will serve her well for most purchases.

Pickle zones change. What you care about at twenty-five isn’t what you care about after additional decades of work, travel, relationships, and general adulting. And, it’s also true that these purchases, often the more expensive choice, aren’t equally available to everyone. The K-shaped economy is making it worse. There is a widening split between high-income and low-income consumer behavior. Income determines how much fancy pasta you can import.⁶ When income compresses, the purchases that once functioned as identity get rationalized into the everyday bucket. The agent accelerates this by offering the efficient substitute. Things get lost forever in those changes.

Who Are You and To Whom?

In addition to “how do I prepare for AI agents” brands should be figuring out where it actually sits in its customers’ mental architecture? This is going to be the new crucible in agentic commerce.

If you’re solidly everyday — for most of your customers, most of the time — the agent is your distribution channel. Embrace the invisible shelf. Optimize away.

If you’re discretionary, invest in the relationship. Build the direct infrastructure. Make the encounter worth having.

For almost everyone else, find out who has you in their pickle zone. That challenge is the most interesting and the least obvious. Your value will be invisible to every system being built to mediate commerce. You can’t win by optimizing for the machine, because what makes you matter isn’t machine-readable. You win by deepening the thing that makes your people care — the community, the expertise, the story, the specificity.

Martelli Pasta has been in Lari since the 1920s. Four shapes. Typically not for the tourists.

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Footnotes

1. Thaler, R. H., “Mental Accounting Matters,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12, 1999.

2. Google Cloud, “The Invisible Shelf: How CPGs Can Win Agentic Commerce in 2026,” January 2026.

3. NielsenIQ and Kearney, “The New Growth Frontier: Agentic Commerce and AI in CPG,” March 2026.

4. Accor (Q3 2025); Hyatt and IHG (Q4 2025); Marriott (early 2026); Hilton AI Planner (March 2026). Hospitality.today, March 2026.

5. Napa Valley Register, March 2026; Taste magazine, Steve Sando interview, 2023.

6. NIQ, “Decoding America’s Great Consumer Split: Inside the New K-Shaped Economy,” January 2026.