December 17, 2025
Today's Briefing: December 17th
NewsAgents Take
Two themes dominate today’s reading.
First, brand strategy is finally catching up to the mechanics of agentic shopping. If agents become a primary discovery and buying surface, retail advantage shifts away from purely creative and channel execution toward “agent readability”, meaning structured product data, trusted fulfillment signals, and policies that can be evaluated by machines.
Second, the trust gap is the constraint. The promise of agents buying routine items like groceries is now close enough to feel real, but the scale of scam exposure and fraud pressure means most consumers are being asked to delegate spending decisions in an environment they already distrust. If that is not solved at the protocol and identity layers, adoption will plateau.
1) Agentic commerce and the strategic implications for retail brands (Deloitte and WSJ)
What happened
Deloitte’s WSJ CMO piece lays out how AI agents could reshape the retail funnel. Rather than brands optimising for search results, social ads, or on-site UX alone, they will need to optimise for agent-mediated journeys where discovery, comparison, and even purchase decisions are delegated to software.
Why it matters
This reframes “brand” in agentic commerce as a machine-interpretable bundle of signals: product truth, price integrity, delivery certainty, and policy clarity.
Retailers that win will likely be those that are easiest for agents to evaluate and transact with, not only those with the best creative.
It also raises new dependency risk: brands may become more reliant on a small number of agent ecosystems for distribution, similar to earlier eras of search and marketplace concentration.
Read:
https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/agentic-commerce-strategic-implications-for-retail-brands-c837b0f5
2) AI agents buying groceries in 2026, but scams remain the headline risk
What happened
This article argues that grocery buying is a natural early use case for agents because it is repetitive, price-sensitive, and highly optimisable. It pairs that optimism with a hard counterpoint: a very high proportion of shoppers report being targeted by scams, raising the question of whether consumers are ready to delegate purchases to autonomous systems in today’s threat environment.
Why it matters
Grocery is the perfect “agent wedge”, but it will only scale if the trust and safety layer is dramatically improved.
Merchant fraud controls and customer support flows are not designed for agent-initiated errors, disputes, or refund abuse at high volume.
This reinforces that agentic commerce is not just a conversion story. It is a security, identity, and governance story.
