If AI Agents Can’t Find You, Do You Even Exist?

On April 23rd, Forter hosted the first-ever roundtable for the Agentic Commerce Collective — a curated community of digital leaders dedicated to navigating the shift from human-led to agent-led shopping. Led by founding members Caleb Bryant (Salesforce), Rajashree Rane (AWS), and Jason Grunberg (Forter) the session moved past the hype of “autonomous bots” to tackle the gritty reality of what it means to be agentic-ready. The consensus? If AI agents can’t find you, you don’t exist.

The new SEO is “Answer Engine Optimization”

The roundtable opened with a fundamental question: Can agents find you? Rajashree (Worldwide Retail & Consumer Goods BD at AWS) emphasized that “agentic-readiness” starts with a merchant’s data being machine-readable. If your product data is trapped in legacy silos or blocked by aggressive bot-mitigation tools, AI crawlers — the “shoppers” of the future — will simply skip your storefront. The retail roundtable agreed that many retailers are inadvertently blocking the very AI agents they want to attract. As one participant noted, merchants need to transition from SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). This means optimizing product data for the “Answer Engines” (like Perplexity or ChatGPT) that now act as the front door for consumer discovery.

High-fidelity storytelling in an AI world

There is a common misconception that AI commerce is a “race to the bottom” based solely on price. The collective argued the opposite: we are entering a golden age of brand storytelling. Caleb (GTM Strategy, Commerce Cloud at Salesforce) and several other retail leaders in the collective discussed the idea of the “head” of the search funnel disappearing. Consumers aren’t just searching for “running shoes,” they are deep in a 20-minute conversation with an AI about marathon training. To win, merchants must provide “high-fidelity” content — long-form Q&As and deeply paired attributes — that allows an AI agent to understand exactly why a product is the right fit for a specific, nuanced human need.

Retention is the new acquisition

When an AI agent completes a transaction inside a third-party interface (like ChatGPT), the merchant risks losing the “Aha!” brand moment and the chance for an upsell. A roundtable participant in the digital commerce consultancy sector noted that as transactions move away from brand sites, customer retention and CRM become more critical than ever. Brands must find new ways to build trust and maintain a relationship with a customer who may never have visited their actual URL.

Join the collective: Live in Chicago & San Francisco

The conversation is just beginning. The Agentic Commerce Collective is taking the stage at our upcoming IMPACT Roadshows to debate where the real opportunity lies and how to navigate an agent-driven world. Join us in person to help rewrite the rules of retail:

• Chicago: May 14th | Morgan’s On Fulton
• San Francisco: May 19th | The Exploratorium

Save your spot for the IMPACT Roadshow