Brett Davis is US Chief Innovation Officer for Deloitte.
Consumer AI has crossed a threshold, shifting from tools that assist decisions to AI agents making decisions on our behalf—implicitly today, and increasingly explicitly tomorrow. With this change comes potential implications for the economy and an evolution in brand competition. The tension is that most organizations still rely on rear-view analytics, investing budgets to understand what happened in the past and to predict the future. But agentic commerce demands forward-looking signal data, something most brands do not currently possess.
This is a tectonic shift, potentially bigger than the move to e-commerce 25 years ago. Most conversations on AI fixate on who will win at the model or platform level. But for consumer companies, bigger implications are coming into view; being absent from an agent’s consideration set is becoming the new version of being out of stock. Three things will determine who wins: whether an LLM can read, understand and trust a brand’s data, whether the brand’s value can be quantified in terms an agent can compare and how fast the organization can act on both.
The New Path To Purchase Runs Through Agents
It will not matter how strong a brand is if a product is not visible, understandable or trusted enough to be considered. This changes marketing, channel strategy and how tightly supply chain planning needs to integrate with agent engagement.
The open question is how far consumers will let this go. According to Prophet’s 2026 AI Powered Consumer Research, more than half of consumers (54%) say autonomous agents acting on their behalf would be helpful. However, according to YouGov’s “American trust in AI for retail” study, while 65% trust it to compare prices, only 14% currently trust AI to place an order on their behalf. Even short of full delegation, agents already shape what we see, compare and consider—which is why closing the trust gap matters as much to brands as it does to the platforms building the agents.
Human-Verified Data Can Strengthen Trust In An Agent-Driven World
In a world where agents increasingly talk to other agents, and AI generates an ever-larger share of the content those agents draw on, human-verified data and sentiment become the foundation of trust.
As AI-generated reviews and synthetic engagement proliferate across forums built over the last 25-plus years of digital commerce, it is getting harder, not easier, to tell whether a signal reflects a real human experience or an engineered one. This makes provenance essential. Brands, platforms and agents will all need to know where a piece of data originated and whether it can be traced and audited to truly trust it.
The next premium is whether that data is always on and durable. Many reviews and sentiment signals sit for months or years. In today’s world, three years might as well be three decades. Data that is human-verified, always on, auditable and predictive of future purchase intent lets brands see around the corner rather than narrate the past. Data that fails any one of those tests becomes a liability that agents will likely learn to discount.
Value Is About More Than Price
One of the most consequential questions in agentic commerce is what data an agent uses to define value. Historically, most purchase decisions have weighed brand against price and called the result “value.” Consumers today apply a broader rubric. Deloitte’s research on the value-seeking consumer shows that between 10% and 40% of what drives a brand’s perceived value has nothing to do with price at all; it’s quality, trust and attitude.
That distinction is the basis of Deloitte’s More-Value-for-the-Price (MVP) framework: brands that deliver more benefit than price alone would suggest. MVP status isn’t a function of being cheap or being premium; it’s earned, and it’s rare. Only about one in three brands studied qualifies as an MVP, and those brands are winning share. Deloitte’s analysis from its Converge Data Signals platform shows consumers are moving from lower-value brands to MVPs.
This same framework underpins the Forbes Best Brands for Value list, published with data collaborator HundredX: a survey of more than 160,000 consumers generating 4.7 million ratings across more than 5,500 brands, comparing what customers say they received against what they paid. The brands at the top are winning because customers believe the benefits they receive with the retailer outweigh cost alone, a distinction that becomes critical once agents, not just humans, are doing the comparing.
In addition, humans often let brand familiarity or loyalty stand in for a full price-value comparison—a shortcut that has let some brands coast on reputation alone. Agents don’t take that shortcut. An agent has no loyalty to spend and no fatigue that would make “good enough” acceptable; it will run the comparison in full every time.
These factors are what turn MVP status from a competitive edge into a precondition for being considered. As agents filter price, quality and specific preference signals, this distinction, not brand strength alone, will help decide winners.
Agentic Commerce Will Reshape Internal Operations
The implications don’t stop at the consumer interface. Think about the full planning lifecycle (trend detection, product choices, sourcing, supply chain, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, sales). In agentic commerce, all of this is reordered, and companies will need new data and insight at every step, from deciding what to bring into a seasonal moment to managing supplier interactions and demand planning.
Additionally, these business areas have traditionally functioned in silos. The same trusted, current, predictive data that helps an agent choose a product externally can also help leaders reimagine their organizations. All of this is possible through a combination of the right technology platforms, trusted third-party data combined with first-party data and a reimagination of current business processes through an agentic lens.
The Next Competitive Advantage Is Trust
Trust is already changing how consumers decide, how brands compete and how companies organize internally. The companies that prosper in this new age will be those that partner well: pairing trusted, human-verified, always-on and predictive data with the people and ecosystem needed to act on it.
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