5 actions every commerce marketer should take to prepare for agentic commerce

At the same time, Talon.One just released its Unified Incentives Protocol (UIP), bringing loyalty, promotions and rewards into the agentic commerce stack. UIP makes incentives machine-readable and actionable, so AI agents can discover, evaluate, and apply them correctly throughout the shopping journey.

We covered what UCP is and how it works in our earlier blog post. This article is the practical follow-up for commerce marketers to help you win in an agentic future. 

As AI agents start making purchase decisions at scale, incentives quietly become the difference between winning on value, or racing to the bottom on price.

But retailers currently have limited ways of controlling which loyalty program functionality and promotions are surfaced during the agentic shopping journey. The result is that agents don’t see the full value that retailers offer, making it more difficult to control margin, retention or long-term customer value. 

Here’s what that process might look like today: 

Let’s say a shopper asks an AI agent to buy a suitcase from Brand A.

The agent finds the product, but immediately surfaces alternative marketplaces alongside the brand’s official website. It can scour the web for the lowest price, or find public or leaked discounts.

When asked for the cheapest option in a specific size, the agent will simply recommend the lowest-priced color variant.

In this world: 

Now imagine the same purchase working the way it should. The agent still compares options, but incentives aren’t based on guesswork. It knows which offers apply to this shopper, which incentives are valid, and how rewards affect long-term value. 

Instead of defaulting to the cheapest option, the agent recommends Brand A over Brand B because the purchase would earn 200 loyalty points and unlock Gold tier status. Loyalty and rewards become part of the decision, not an afterthought.

In this world:

This is why Talon.One developed the Unified Incentives Protocol - to give brands a new set of standards to design, control, and enforce incentives throughout the agentic shopping journey.

The decisions businesses make now to prepare for agentic commerce will shape how they compete for years, just as they did in the early days of ecommerce.

Moments like this are rare. For commerce marketers, this is a once-in-a-career opportunity to lead a fundamental shift in how shopping works.

The 5 actions below show where to focus now as agentic shopping becomes the norm.

Agentic commerce isn’t something one team can prepare for alone. It cuts across ecommerce, marketing, data, and execution, and needs shared ownership from the start.

Brands making real progress are bringing together commerce marketing, loyalty, ecommerce, data, and engineering, often with legal or privacy involved early for identity and consent. Treat agentic readiness the way you would a major digital transformation: align teams early, agree on priorities, and move with intent.

Start with a focused pilot, such as enabling identity-linked loyalty in one agent-enabled flow, then expand as learnings compound.

Promotions and loyalty can have a huge influence on the purchase decision. In agentic commerce, that means incentives need to be immediately usable by AI agents.

Today, many teams still manage incentives across a promotions platform, separate loyalty program software, ecommerce campaigns, at the POS, and across their CRM. Humans can work around that. Agents can’t. When incentives are unclear or unavailable, they default to price.

Forward-looking brands have already centralized promotion and loyalty decisioning into a single system. This gives every channel, human or agent-led, the same rules to follow, with better margin control and more predictable outcomes.

If your promotions and loyalty systems cannot respond quickly or expose structured data, agents will not surface your incentives. The result is competing purely on list price or losing visibility altogether.

Agentic leaders treat discoverability as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Incentives must be machine-readable, fast to evaluate, and consistently available at the moment of decision. With Talon.One’s Unified Incentives Protocol, brands can make sure that promotions and loyalty perks are exposed in structured formats that agents can discover and apply in real time.  

Basic earn-and-burn loyalty programs struggle in agentic commerce. Simple discounts are easy for AI agents to compare, rank, and commoditize, which pushes brands into price-based competition with little room to differentiate.

Brands that will win in agent-led environments need to build loyalty value beyond discounts. Tier status, access, recognition, and experiences can create signals that agents could factor into decisions without triggering a race to the bottom on price. 

If your loyalty program only hands out discounts, it won’t hold up in an agentic future. Brands should focus on benefits that clearly add value while creating simple paths to turn agent-driven purchases into direct, long-term customer relationships.

In agentic commerce, identity linking is how brands stay connected to their customers. UCP’s Identity Linking, for example, lets shoppers link their store account to their AI agent of choice, so they can use loyalty points and personalized offers while shopping via agentic commerce.

To make this work, customers need a reason to opt in. Leading brands are using loyalty to do exactly that: rewarding customers for identifying themselves and giving consent across every channel, including agent-led shopping.

Agentic commerce is quickly becoming part of how shopping works. For commerce marketers, now is the moment to act - making sure incentives are clear enough for agents to understand, and controlled enough to protect margins. 

Do I need to fully adopt UCP today to prepare for agentic commerce?

No. Agent-led shopping is still in its infancy, so what matters now is readiness. That means promotions and loyalty in one place, available in real time, with clear rules and customer identity attached. When those foundations are in place, connecting to UCP (or any future agent standard) becomes a straightforward integration, not a replatforming effort.

In short: don’t rush the protocol, but instead fix the foundations.

How is loyalty different from discounts in agent-led shopping?

Discounts are easy for agents to compare and optimize, which often drives decisions toward the lowest price. Loyalty introduces differentiated value that goes beyond price, such as status, access, recognition, and long-term rewards. When surfaced correctly, loyalty signals help agents factor brand preference and customer value into decisions, not just immediate savings. 

What is the biggest risk for retailers in agentic commerce today?

Losing control of discounts. AI agents can find and apply every offer they come across - leaked codes, expired campaigns, and incentives never meant for broad use.

Without a single system to govern who gets what and when, margins erode quickly. Agentic commerce favors brands that design promotions with machines in mind: clear rules, tight limits, and intentional offers.