Brand First: How Retailers Win Hearts, Wallets & The Algorithm

What's particularly noteworthy is RetailBrand First: How Retailers Win Hearts, Wallets & The AlgorithmByJill Standish, Contributor

Furthermore, Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights

I examine how retailers can build resilient, responsible es

More robot application, OpenAI generate (quite telling), given current economic conditions

Moreover, Futuristic nology (quite telling), given current economic conditions

Virtual assistant on internet

Getty Showing up where your shoppers actually look has always been tough—and today it’s tougher

Meanwhile, Isn’t what it used to be; you can’t rely on keywords, links, or banner noise to climb the results (noteworthy indeed)

Discovery now flows across engines, social s, retail media networks, marketplaces, and AI assistants that stitch signals together in real time (which is quite significant)

Additionally, In this AI‑curated path to purchase, retailers win by being smarter—not louder—through structured data, credible content, and a, consistent brand that shoppers trust and algorithms surface

Generative AI enters the conversation Generative AI (gen AI) is reimagining the digital shopping experience by making the duct experience conversational, given current economic conditions

Meanwhile, It used to be that consumers ed for a brand or a duct by using brand names, or information such as pricing to pull up results

But now, they can ask for advice and recommendations, in today's market environment

Additionally, And for active users— defined as people using gen AI tools at least weekly for personal and/or fessional reasons, it’s now the second highest source for duct recommendations after physical stores

Conversely, The survey also found gen AI is no longer just a tool for speed and personalization—it’s becoming a confidant and trusted advisor

MORE FOR YOU When consumers trust AI as they would a close friend, every interaction becomes an opportunity to deepen—or lose—that relationship, in light of current trends

Personalized recommendations A great example of tapping AI to deeper consumer relationships is AI-powered multi-brand beauty startup, Noli, founded and backed by the L'Oréal Groupe

Noli—which stands for (No One I’)—is on a mission to empower every beauty consumer with their own intelligent, trusted advisor, in light of current trends

Nevertheless, Noli is reinventing how people discover and shop beauty ducts by addressing the number one pain point for beauty customers—too many options, and lack of unbiased, often conflicting, advice in the market

Nevertheless, Noli cuts through the beauty noise with AI diagnostics trained on 1M+ skin data points and thousands of duct formulations, given the current landscape

It decodes each user’s beauty file and ders confident duct picks to their door

Co‑Founder & CEO Amos Susskind says, “Beauty is full of choice, opinions, claims, noise, and emotional stakes, making it the perfect category for personalization and expert guidance. ” Master the large language model ecosystem It's easy to see how large language models (LLMs) are fast becoming the new influencers

According to Accenture’s survey consumers are already using gen AI to inform purchase decisions, making it the fastest-growing source for recommendations

Furthermore, To avoid being misrepresented, or excluded from consumer consideration entirely, retailers need to take an active role in the LLM ecosystem – a network of models, platforms, and data sources, in light of current trends

Furthermore, Winning now means optimizing for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as well as classic SEO—because AI assistants don’t crawl, index, and rank traditional ; they synthesize, summarize, and represent your brand, amid market uncertainty

Nevertheless, Them structured, high‑quality, rights‑ed content that’s current and consistent; refresh it often; tag it so context is ; and monitor AI surfaces to correct drift

Do that, and your brand story shows up accurately—and gets —across AI chats, agents, and shoppable answers

However, Prepare for Agentic Personal Shoppers Then there’s the newer member of the AI family, agentic AI, a nology that can act autonomously on behalf of consumers—making purchases without the traditional shopping journey

When shoppers delegate decisions to agentic shopping agents, AI effectively becomes the buyer of record

Traditional retail media—banner ads, paid slots, even your website—can be skipped as agents source the “best fit” directly from data s, reviews, inventory, and price APIs

That’s the threat: a frictionless race to the lowest acceptable price

Make sure your brand carries machine‑readable reasons to choose you—quality signals, experience benefits, sustainability creds, fit/usage guidance, service guarantees—that matter to humans and to their agents

On the other hand, At the same time, Give AI more to weigh than price, and you stay in the basket

Nevertheless, Trust hinges on transparent, consent‑based data use—shoppers are used to tuning their own recommendation s and don’t want their data repurposed in ways that surprise them

Tect that trust with strong cybersecurity and data governance

Keep humans in the loop so AI reflects brand values and ders the service customers expect

However, The win: AI experiences that are personal and trustworthy sustained by investment in, training, and teams that keep great retail brands real

This analysis suggests that time to act is now The investments retailers and brands make today will determine whether they remain visible, relevant, and indispensable in an AI-driven world of tomorrow

While some retailers debate whether to embrace AI, others are already reshaping the industry by using AI to become more empathetic, more responsive, and more valuable to consumers than ever before

But they'll do so while maintaining the human touch—be that the store associate or customer service agent—that makes brands memorable and meaningful

The question is: will your brand be among them (fascinating analysis)

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