For three decades, digital commerce operated on a simple model: guide consumers through stages. Awareness leads to consideration, consideration leads to intent, and intent leads to purchase. Each stage had its own channels, its own metrics, its own specialists.
Top of funnel: Brand campaigns, display ads, content marketing
Middle of funnel: Retargeting, email nurturing, comparison content
Bottom of funnel: Shopping ads, cart recovery, checkout optimization
We built entire industries around managing friction between these stages. Comparison sites existed because consumers needed help evaluating options. Retargeting existed because consumers abandoned journeys midway. Cart recovery existed because even high-intent users got distracted.
Agentic commerce doesn’t optimize this funnel. It eliminates it.
When a user asks an AI agent, “I need hiking boots for a trip to Patagonia next month, waterproof, under $200, good ankle support,”—and the agent responds with three options, checks inventory, verifies the user’s size from past purchases, and completes checkout in the same conversation—every stage of the traditional funnel happens simultaneously.
There is no awareness stage. There is no consideration stage. There is no separate intent signal. There is only: question → recommendation → transaction.
The Key Distinction: What Collapses vs. What Transforms
Before diving into the mechanics of the agentic funnel, let’s be clear about what this analysis is and isn’t claiming.
The transactional funnel collapses. The brandfunnel does not disappear; it transforms.
When an AI recommends Salomon over a generic hiking boot brand, that recommendation isn’t random; it’s reading decades of accumulated brand equity expressed through reviews, expert citations, consumer sentiment, and third-party validation.
Traditional awareness campaigns built mental availability, the probability that a consumer thinks of your brand when a need arises.
In the agentic era, that mental availability shifts: the brand must be available not just in the consumer’s mind, but in the AI’s reasoning.
The content, reputation, and trust signals that brands build become the inputs the AI evaluates when deciding what to recommend:
Reviews and ratings → Shape AI confidence scores
Expert citations → Build entity authority in AI training data
Consumer sentiment → Influence AI trust signals
Third-party validation → Determine whether AI considers you credible
When we say “the funnel collapses,” we mean the commerce journey, from discovery to transaction, compresses into a single moment.
But the upstream work of building brand preference, authority, and trust? That work remains essential. It just flows into the AI’s recommendation logic rather than directly into a consumer’s purchase decision.
The brands that win in agentic commerce will be those that understand this distinction:
Transactional friction disappears, but brand building becomes the infrastructure that determines whether you’re in the AI’s top 3 at all.
Brand doesn’t matter less. It matters differently, and arguably more, because there’s no second page of results to fall back on.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
