For the better part of a decade, brand voice was a brand strategy problem. You wrote guidelines. You trained the team. You kept a tone chart somewhere in a shared drive. And then the words went out into the world, on product pages, in ad copy, across social feeds , and mostly did their job without anyone asking hard questions about whether they were actually working.

That era is over. Not because voice stopped mattering. Because it started mattering in a way no one anticipated, and for an audience no one was writing for.

Something fundamental shifted in how commerce works, and it happened quietly. No single product launch announced it. No headline captured the full scope of it. But if you pay close attention to where purchasing decisions are actually being made in 2026, the picture is unmistakable: the consumer is no longer the first entity to interact with your brand. The AI agent is. And the brands that understand what that means, not just technologically, but linguistically , will define the next era of retail.

“Commerce used to live in channels. Now it lives in conversations. The brands that win won’t be the ones consumers find first, they’ll be the ones AI agents choose first.” (ErBa)

The Shopping Journey Compressed. Brand Voice Did Not Keep Up.

The most-cited development of 2025 was the maturation of AI in the consumer shopping experience. Not AI as a backend tool. AI as the front door. Eighty-two per cent of senior ecommerce leaders surveyed identified AI as a defining force in retail over the past year, a sharp climb from sixty per cent who said the same thing at the end of 2024. That jump is not incremental. It signals a phase transition: from AI as a novelty to AI as infrastructure.

In practical terms, this means consumers no longer arrive at a product page cold and scan for information. They arrive with questions already half-answered, decisions already narrowed, and expectations already shaped by a conversation that occurred before they ever saw a brand’s website. AI compressed the shopper journey, shifting it from attention to intention.

For brand voice, this is a reorientation of the entire playing field. When the entry point to a product was a Google search, you could get away with a voice that was informational, authoritative, and slightly impersonal. The page did the persuading. The image did the trust-building. The words just needed to not get in the way.

That playbook is obsolete. The consumer arriving today has already had a conversation with ChatGPT, with a voice assistant, with an AI-powered shopping tool, and they come to your brand expecting to continue that conversation, not restart it. If your product pages, descriptions, navigation language, and content still read like a catalogue, you are speaking to a customer who no longer exists.

Commerce Escaped Its Container

For two decades, commerce had a shape. There were websites. There were apps. There were stores. Consumers moved between them with some friction, but the journey was predictable. You searched. You browsed. You bought. The brand controlled the environment. The consumer controlled the pace.

That architecture is dissolving. Commerce is now embedding itself into the surfaces people already occupy, social feeds, streaming media, connected vehicles, smart home devices, and conversational AI interfaces. A product surfaces in a TikTok video. A recipe on a cooking show becomes a shoppable grocery list. A car dashboard prompts a driver to recharge or reorder. Shopping is no longer something consumers go somewhere to do. It is something that happens to them, around them, and increasingly, on their behalf.

The scale of this shift is significant. The global e-commerce market is projected to grow from roughly $25 trillion in 2024 to over $80 trillion by 2030, not because more people are opening more browser tabs, but because commerce is expanding into surfaces and moments that did not previously exist as retail touchpoints. Social commerce alone is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near term, with livestream formats expanding rapidly beyond Asia. Retail and commerce media are on track to exceed $100 billion in global advertising spending. These are not future projections. They are trajectories already in motion.

Five arenas illustrate where commerce is embedding most aggressively: social and livestream commerce, shoppable and commerce media, immersive and AR experiences, in-car and IoT commerce, and agentic commerce itself. Across all of them, the pattern is the same. Commerce is spreading across surfaces. Buying moments are multiplying. And the journeys are becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to manage independently.

The Agent Becomes the Gatekeeper

As commerce multiplied across surfaces, a new problem emerged: consumers could not keep up. Managing dozens of touchpoints, comparing options across platforms, tracking prices, and applying preferences and constraints became unsustainable. So consumers began delegating.

AI personal shoppers, embedded in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and a growing number of platform-native interfaces, are now the organising layer for this fragmented world. A consumer expresses intent. The agent does the rest. It researches options, compares prices, factors in delivery speed, applies loyalty benefits, assembles a basket across multiple merchants, and in an increasing number of cases, completes the purchase without the consumer ever visiting a brand’s website.

This is not a convenience feature. It is a structural reorganisation of who sits between a brand and its customer. The agent is now the first point of contact, the primary evaluator, and in many cases, the final decision-maker. Brands that are not legible to these systems, or that do not provide structured, clear, machine-actionable data, are being bypassed entirely.

The implications for how those agents evaluate and select products are already becoming clear. Shoppers arriving via AI agents tend to have higher intent and clearer constraints than those arriving through traditional search. This fundamentally changes conversion dynamics, but only for brands whose products, pricing, and fulfilment data are structured well enough for agents to act on. Ambiguous offers get skipped. Incomplete data gets ignored. There is no second chance to clarify.

Conversational Commerce Is Not a Feature. It Is the New Default.

The shift toward conversational commerce is not a shift toward more technology layered on top of existing retail experiences. It is a shift toward an inherently linguistic mode of interaction. Consumers are no longer clicking through categories. They are asking questions. They are describing problems. They say things like “I need something for a humid climate” or “What works for sensitive skin in winter?” and expect an answer that sounds like it came from someone who understood the question.

This is the critical insight that most brands are missing. Technology changes and AI capabilities have actually made shopping more human, not less. Conversational shopping aligns with how people naturally talk, think, and make decisions. The consumer moves from being the operator of every step to the author of the brief. And the agent, or the brand surface it lands on , must be able to meet that brief in kind.

For brands, this means voice is no longer a polish layer applied after strategy is set. Voice is the strategy. The words you choose, the way you frame your product’s value, and the register you use to address someone who is already in the decision-making process are not copywriting concerns. They are commercial ones. They directly determine whether an AI agent surfaces your product, whether a consumer feels enough trust to convert, and whether your brand earns the kind of recommendation that now functions as the top of the funnel.

Profitability Changed the Conversation. Voice Must Change With It.

Sixty-four per cent of senior ecommerce leaders flagged profitability, margin pressure, or growth discipline as defining themes of 2025. The era of growth at any cost is over. Media costs, retail media complexity, and operational constraints collided, resulting in a fundamental reprioritisation: brands can no longer afford to shout louder. They have to be heard more precisely.

This has direct implications for voice strategy. When every media dollar is being scrutinised against margin, brands cannot rely on volume, more ads, more impressions, more content, to drive results. They have to rely on relevance. And relevance, at its core, is a function of how well a brand’s language matches what a consumer actually needs to hear at a given moment.

The brands that navigated 2025 well were not the ones with the flashiest tools or the biggest budgets. They were the ones who clarified what actually drives profitable demand. For voice, that clarity means something specific: stop writing for attention. Start writing for conversion. Stop treating copy as decoration. Start treating it as the primary commercial lever it has become.

This does not mean brands should sound cold or transactional. The opposite is true. The most effective voice in a high-intent shopping context is warm, specific, and confident without being aggressive. It is the voice of someone who knows the product deeply and respects the consumer’s intelligence enough to be direct. It is the voice that makes a shopper feel like they have found the right answer, not just a product, but a match.

The Digital Shelf Is Now the Audition. Voice Is How You Perform.

Perhaps the most consequential structural shift of the past year is this: digital performance is no longer downstream of physical retail. It is upstream. Brands are increasingly being asked to prove themselves online first, through their web presence, their marketplace listings, and their content quality, before earning or expanding physical shelf space.

The digital shelf is no longer a mirror of the physical shelf. It is the audition.

This reframes voice as a gatekeeper, not just a differentiator. Content quality, conversion signals, and the overall coherence of a brand’s online experience are now the criteria by which retailers evaluate whether a product deserves wider distribution. And coherence, at scale, starts with voice. A brand that sounds inconsistent across its product pages, ads, marketplace listings, and owned content is not just failing at brand building. It is failing the audition.

What Brands Must Build For

The question every brand should be asking right now is not “How do we rank higher in search? ” It is “How do we get recommended by an AI agent that has never seen our website?” That reframing changes everything, from how product data is structured to how pricing is communicated to how brand voice operates across machine-readable surfaces.

Three priorities will separate the brands that thrive in an agent-mediated market from those that get left behind.

First: make your data agent-ready. Product information, pricing, availability, fulfilment terms, and brand positioning must be structured, consistent, and immediately actionable. Agents bypass offers that are ambiguous or hard to execute. There is no second chance to clarify.

Second: clarify your agentic strategy. Decide whether your brand is playing a destination game, driving consumers to owned channels to protect margins, or an evaluation game, earning recommendations from agents across the open web. Most brands will need both. But the evaluation game is where volume lives now. Winning in agentic commerce requires being discoverable to machines, not just compelling to humans.

Third: measure missions, not channels. Channel-centric KPIs are becoming meaningless when a single purchase journey spans a social video, a conversational AI interface, a universal cart, and a third-party checkout. The metric that matters is how often your brand appears and wins inside agent-influenced baskets. How profitability changes when journeys span surfaces. How value grows as replenishment and cross-sell become automated.

The Voice Problem Gets Harder. And More Consequential.

For brands already thinking about voice on the web, how they sound, how they position, how their words do commercial work, the agent economy adds an entirely new dimension. It is no longer enough to write for humans. Brand voice must now operate at the intersection of human persuasion and machine comprehension simultaneously.

A product description that reads beautifully on a landing page but lacks the structured clarity an AI agent needs to evaluate it will not be recommended. A brand narrative that resonates emotionally in an ad but does not translate into clear, comparable, actionable signals disappears the moment an agent enters the buying journey.

The brands that will win in 2026 are the ones that treat voice as a system, not a style guide. A system that governs how the brand speaks on a product page, how it positions itself in an AI-generated recommendation, how it frames value in a retail media ad, and how it guides a consumer from first question to final purchase. Every touchpoint. One coherent voice. Aligned to a single understanding of who the customer is and what they need to hear.

This is not the end of brand voice. It is the beginning of a harder, more consequential version of it. The brands that figure out how to write and structure for both audiences at once will not just survive the shift; they will thrive. They will own it.

What This Demands Right Now

The shift is not coming. It is here. AI agents are already shaping purchase decisions. Conversational commerce is already changing how consumers arrive at product pages. The question-based search paradigm is already replacing the keyword-based one. The economics of retail are already forcing brands to be more precise, not louder. And commerce is already embedding itself into surfaces that did not exist as retail touchpoints five years ago.

For most brands, this means an uncomfortable audit. Not of their design. Not of their logistics. Of their words.

How does your brand sound when a consumer asks a question? How does your product description read when an AI agent is evaluating it for a recommendation? How does your content perform when the entry point is a conversation, not a click? How does your data hold up when an agent is assembling a basket across a dozen merchants, and yours needs to be the one it chooses?

These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions that will separate the brands that grow profitably in 2026 from the ones that struggle to be found at all.

A decade from now, visiting a website to shop may feel as dated as calling a catalogue phone number. Commerce will not live in channels. It will be woven into everyday activity and coordinated by AI agents acting on consumers’ behalf. The brands that win will not be the ones with the most channels. They will be the ones whose products, data, and voice are easiest for agents to understand, assemble, and choose.

The opportunity is significant. The complexity is real. And the brands that embrace both, that understand voice on the web is no longer a supporting role but the lead one, will be the ones that define what retail sounds like next.

J.J. Thompson

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Strategic Outlook Series.
(Analysis informed by industry research on embedded commerce, agentic shopping, AI-mediated purchase journeys, and ecommerce brand strategy published January 2026).