#54: Your Next Customer Might Be a Bot (Well, Not on Amazon)
Amazon’s choice to block 3rd party bots will only be temporary
Imagine this scenario.
Your alarm clock goes off at 7AM. You immediately regret going to bed late last night and choose to hit the snooze button.
After nine minutes pass and another ring shocks your system, you check your phone to see a weak sleep score on your Whoop app.
Ping! You get a few more notifications on your phone coming from Instacart and Starbucks.
Instacart adjusts your grocery delivery order today, adding in more fruits and vegetables since your sleep score was low and Starbucks also changes your typical latte to a red eye given you are dragging. You’ve provided pre-approval on spend limits, so the apps can work in sync with each other and execute transactions.
If you’re a technologist at heart, this sounds like a dream scenario. All your devices connected, working off each other’s inputs. It’s not yet reality, but thanks to AI’s latest advancements particularly in payment infrastructure, it could be just a year or two away.
Furthermore, I believe AI will bifurcate commerce into two distinct categories: monotony and discovery. Your AI agent handles the boring daily purchases (like groceries) while you spend your time researching bigger ticket purchases like buying a house or a car. Monotonous purchases are routine and lend themselves to automation, while discovery purchases are ad hoc and often emotional.
Soon enough, we will have a personal AI agent shop for all our monotonous commerce transactions.
But not if Amazon has something to say about it.
According to PPCLand, Amazon is now blocking external AI shopping bots from accessing its data, meaning AI shopping assistants can’t complete purchases directly on Amazon. Google, Meta, and Huawei are also on the blacklist, and will no longer be able to use bots to scrape data from Amazon.
Industry insiders see this as a move to limit competitors from gathering any sort of insight on Amazon’s advertising or marketplace business. If there’s anyone who will build AI shopping at scale, Amazon wants it to be themselves and certainly does not want to supply others with anything that could create a competitive advantage.
Now, Amazon isn’t the only e-commerce giant rejecting AI scrapers. Shopify is looking to stay in control, as they bluntly state in their storefront code that an AI shopping assistant is not allowed to complete a transaction without any human involvement in the process. That means neither scrapers nor AI shopping assistants.
It’s a tricky time. Technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that Big Tech (will give Shopify the honorable mention) is putting up guardrails so AI doesn’t poke holes in their business model.
I get it though. A business is only as valuable as their customer base and if AI agents or competitors scraping data present an existential threat to their loyal customer set, something must be done. I expect Amazon and Shopify to lift their bot ban once they put in a solution that still allows each platform to own the customer relationship (or the brand, on behalf of Shopify). But they’re just buying time before the inevitable shift in commerce takes form.
AI agents are here to stay, which means the definition of “customer” needs to change. As we now have two types of customers: humans and AI agents.
Customer Acquisition Breakout
Humans -> Discovery Commerce -> Brand Awareness Advertising
AI Agents -> Monotony Commerce -> Direct Response Advertising
Two new types of customers mean two different ways they transact and can be marketed to. We are at the top of the first inning of the bifurcation of commerce, which means that brands have a massive opportunity to get ahead and create a distinct acquisition strategy for both types of customers. This shift is generational, if not once in a lifetime.
Let’s dive deeper into the advertising component in this new split model.
For monotonous purchases, let the AI agents do the work. Amazon and Shopify have the resources to build the back-end infrastructure to power a new-age of commerce that also includes AI agents as potential customers. The AI agent serves as an extension of a person and is influenced by that person’s preferences. I predict direct response advertising will undergo massive upheaval, since it has always been centered on getting people to transact.
If fewer humans make purchases directly, advertising designed to trigger them is broken. Think about it: if there’s no one to click on one of the sponsored blue links atop Google search results, what’s the point of advertising there?
Direct response advertising will soon cater to AI agents. This could come in the form of allowing e-commerce brands to create specific content to pick up the attention of an AI agent in the sea of other product options. Or it could follow suit to trying to rank on foundational models via generative engine optimization (GEO for short). Advertising to AI agents will be almost entirely algorithmic.
On the flip side, advertising to humans will become a whole lot less measurable (picturing a performance marketer cringing as I write this). That’s because people will delegate their tedious (monotonous) purchases to AI agents, freeing up time to think through higher-priced buys (discovery). The creative strategists will shine here. Eye-catching, thought-provoking advertising campaigns will create the emotional connection brands can only hope for.
As part of the core discovery commerce thesis, I expect brands to invest much more of their budget towards the upper-funnel, brand awareness campaigns that foster affinity. Loyalty will matter more than ever, as the purchases where people feel more connected to the brand may be made more intentionally.
Investing in brand awareness can also help you win on the monotonous commerce side. Although it’s more likely than not that these agents make decisions based on price, availability, and shipping times, humans can provide instructions to buy (or not buy) a product from a brand. There’s no reason why you can’t delegate the task of buying from your favorite brand to your AI agent.
It'll be crucial for brands to understand where they fall on the monotonous versus discovery commerce spectrum. Additionally, there will be plenty of grey areas as certain people will view some monotonous purchases as higher consideration than others.
Signing off. The brands that adapt their customer acquisition strategies now will shape the next era of commerce.