Ep 615: Prepare Your Brand for Agentic Commerce (How LLMs Are Collapsing the Consideration Phase)

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilot House, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media, and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilot House operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilot House. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show. A really important conversation that I think a lot of people are not aware of right now is how do I sell to an agent?

0:38We haven't had to change our behavior as marketers. Now this presupposes we're actually going to have to change what it is that we do. No longer am I heading to Amazon to compare products or read reviews. I'm allowing an LLM to narrow the shortlist for me. If you make that wrong call and you're too committed to a persona that doesn't exist or is uninterested in your product, it's not just a strategic miss anymore. It's like your brand's a flop. Goodbye. You're not going to be able to run a business.

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2:24Visit triplewhale.com, that's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com to learn more. It's all killer, no filler, and I'm Eric here with Daniel and Abe's from Pilot House. I just came off my trip to LA where I was at the Whaley's, and this will all be, I think, disseminated out through our content, But the big announcement there was Triple Whale and the launch of Mobi2, which is their agentic media buying assistant or media buyer, essentially, that allows you to advertise agentically 24-7 with these agents, which was really, there's a lot of interesting opinions around it. But that's not exactly what we're talking about today.

3:05The topic that you guys brought to me today was more about the agentic shopper and actually what our customers, how our customers are using these platforms and kind of what we can do about it. Aves, do you want to kick us off with a bit of your preface that you were talking to me about? Yeah, for sure. I think I am someone who, like Charlie XCX, I love to be early to things. And so something that happens a lot in digital marketing is we all get really swept up in a singular topic. And for the past two years, that's been how are we as marketers using AI? But it's a really easy question to answer from my perspective.

3:41And there are very simple solutions. And Eric, you were saying, well, some of this is in our content, but people are actively using it. Big brands are using AI to do marketing. But the interesting thing for me has always been how does the average consumer scrolling their feed, first of all, feel about AI? Second of all, how do they use AI? That is a much more interesting and valuable conversation because at the end of the day, as marketers, we're trying to influence human behavior and decision making. But humans are outsourcing their decision making to agentic AI. So the question stops being, how can I prompt most efficiently and what can I automate versus what can I use AI for in more of a thinking capacity?

4:27and the like really important conversation that I think a lot of people are not aware of right now is how do I sell to an agent properly? Because coming into Q4 like this year, just the amount of people who are going to use agentic AI to say, find me a really nice gift for my mom who likes to stay inside or my mom who's like a big wine drinker. Like that's the kind of question that people are asking already of their LLM. So it's only going to increase. Like we'll talk a little bit more in the episode, but the amount of trust that people have in their agents is far deeper than the amount of trust that they have in a brand showing them an ad on Facebook, right?

5:12So there's so much opportunity there. And I'm just really excited to talk about it and start working on it because it's cool. And it actually does shift the landscape of digital marketing and i think the way that we all thought using the tools was going to shift the landscape this is actually what's what's shifting the landscape we haven't had to change our behavior as marketers like we're only doing the same thing that we've always done better and and faster and like what aves is talking about is like now this presupposes like we're actually going to have to change what it is that we do because like yeah ai is about to collapse a whole bunch of what we're used to into a lot of a muddier, more murky path for a consumer, right?

5:55For a marketer, rather, than a consumer. For a marketer, for the consumer, it's cleaner because they have this agent who knows so much. Every time I'm talking to my chat, GVT, and I'll ask it a question, I'll be like, well, because I know you're this, this, and this, and this, and this, and you have this problem, and this problem, and this problem, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just like, I forgot that you know all of this stuff about me. Have either of you bought something agentically yet? I mean, define agentically, Eric. Are we talking about autonomous checkout or are we talking about using - Recommended.

6:25Product recommended, I would say. I would say, yeah, 100%. I've recently done it for some vitamins that were recommended to me by a physician and comparing what was best. That's the really interesting point of that kind of like agentic trade-off here is like we're not saying like ai go buy this for me but like no longer am i heading to amazon to like compare products or like read reviews or like even start to like like look for recommendations like i'm allowing an llm to narrow the shortlist for me and then i like i find that i'll i'll research maybe the top two or three choices that are recommend it, but I've stopped deciding what is worth buying and have abdicated a lot, at least much of the consideration to Chai GPT and likewise.

7:19A couple of the big proof points, I was just doing some research before this. In 2025, during Q4 holiday season, I forget what the source was, but it was about 20 % of people were estimated to have used an LLM in their purchase path, which is already crazy thinking back to the holiday season last year, that it's already 20%. The other proof point that's interesting is from an agency, I always look at which who's driving the leads to pilot house kind of thing. And I think it was last month that ChatGPT was both the top referral source and the top closing rate. We're used to when the lead comes from like DTC or, you know, from the newsletter, from the podcast, we have a really great close rate because people are already kind of warmed up to us.

8:01But I think we're seeing as of last month, ChatGPT has even got a higher conversion rate, higher price point of brands who are kind of looking for our services. So it's definitely happening. Yeah. Like the intent is there, right? Like it's such a different mindset you're in. I keep using, because Daniel's always wearing one of two hoodies. So I keep using this example. Can you zoom out on Maduro hoodie you got on? i just realized i am literally wearing the same hoodie i was in the last time i appeared on all killer no filler that's sad we do love him but i always have been using this example for daniel's like if daniel decides i want a third hoodie that's like maybe we go beige this time we've got like dark gray light gray we're going beige if he like asks chat what is a great brand for a like beige hoodie he's in a much different mindset than just like kind of fooling around on youtube or google and searching with kind of 50 intent to buy but mostly you're just researching but people are like already at the point of spending money when they're asking an like you got i would say like 50 intent when you're googling and you're researching and you're for brands for vitamins or that new hoodie.

9:21But if you're asking your LLM, it's like you're pretty ready to buy. And you also, because you trust it, you're pretty ready to buy what it recommends. It's interesting you mentioned, Eric, like the funnel changing a little bit for brands like Pilot House. And like, it doesn't surprise me with B2B at all. Like the more like a category like makes you think or compare or like doubt your purchase or even ask for recommendations and advice, like the more exposed it is to to ai shopping so like vitamins obvious one like i but like health and wellness like we're going to see it with like health care supplements are going to be huge those are the primary use cases where like there's a massive amount of choice and a lot of opinions and like yeah ai just helps us mediate those things can we just talk real quickly about because i was going doing a little research on like how this has kind of been rolled out and when it was first rolled out, I guess in like early March, ChatGPT had launched a way that you could just one click buy from the ChatGPT interface.

10:22And I feel like they've rolled that back a little bit and pushed the checkout experience due to like maybe some hallucination or not really understanding or being able to translate the Shopify data into ChatGPT properly. But now it's more of a, it's pulling the information in from Shopify, but you're still checking out on Shopify and the actual storefronts, correct? Yeah, I think rolling it back is a great way to put it because I think this is happening a lot with most open AI products where we put it into the market and then it's like not good and we take it back and then we have a better version of it.

10:53I do think right now it's like recommendations and you are manually checking out. But some of the work that I am seeing my friends who work on more of the Shopify dev side starting to do is prepping checkouts for completely agentic checkout. I don't know. That does make sense. There's a lot of checkout, but it's like, that's kind of the direction it's heading. I think it's like premature right now. But I think in like less than a year, most people will be really comfortable giving chat their entire financial information to make that checkout itself. Google IO just demoed a feature like in the upcoming Android set where, yeah, user walked up to a concert poster, took an image, was prompted would you like two tickets for this concert and press yes.

11:40And that was the extent of the transaction. So like talk about like advocate, like I didn't even see a price confirmation in there, right? Like I'm sure they edited it out for effect, but like that's closer, like that's being built into the next operating systems that we're all, are all going to be rolled out to our phones soon enough. Right. I think your point is about this being quite often for problem aware people. It's probably cannibalizing Google maybe a little bit more than it's cannibalizing meta, which is more of a true top of funnel play where you're, I go on meta or Facebook pretty much just to shop at this point, just to see the clothing brands that I like in the ads.

12:17But what does this do to the funnel? What do these LLMs, it's basically kind of like eating the middle out of the funnel in a way, right? Exactly. Is that right? Yeah, we've talked about, like Daniel and I've been talking about the way that it crushes a consideration window because I can like, again, the hoodie example, I can hit Daniel with like 10 ads for a cream hoodie. And that is going to cost me a lot of money as a marketer. But if I figure out how to put together a gentic centric strategy and we are showing up when Daniel asked that question that we asked earlier, like, where do I get a cream hoodie?

12:53The consideration window is just squashed completely. And so it can be, I think, very efficient for brands to start thinking about this because then you don't have to be hitting a singular person with, you know, 10 touch points before they buy. It's a couple true top of funnel awareness ads on Meta. And then that person's prime, they're interested, they're problem aware, and then they go for it. So what do we think we do here? What is the play? I think of Pilot House and I think of like, we've sort of blasted Pilot House into the ether for like 1 ,200 newsletter issues. All these podcasts that are kind of leading back to Pilot House as this source of authority.

13:33We haven't done almost anything to optimize our pages in some sort of SEO kind of capability. But how should brands think about structuring their content in a way to make themselves more discoverable? It's interesting that you ask that, Eric. As marketers, we were rewarded in the past for like, traditional search rewarded us for visibility. So we were doing okay. Because in that sense, think of all of the tendrils that we can send out into the ether. They're all roads back to the brand, right? the change happens now is like the agentic search rewards not just like visibility but like more so like clarity credibility and evidence and in so like just by like establishing the experience and the expertise of a podcast like DTC that's gone a long way like in the pursuit of visibility we've also you know clarity built credibility in the pursuit of visibility and that's going to ultimately be what drives like agentic search and will be rewarded through through agentic search so it's not altogether that different from from from seo but it is kind of like an evolution of it right like it would really falling back to the old kind of like google's rewarding experience expertise authority and trust like that's traditional seo but it's also uh it extends into AEO and GEO or whatever you want to call the next frontier of marketing.

15:07How should we think about that Venn diagram? Because I understand SEO and AEO do have overlap. I know SEO for years has gone away from this idea of like technical SEO that you're trying to talk to the bots essentially who will serve you to really being as useful as you can for the customer. And I know AEO is about that as well. But what parts of the process do we need to be thinking about that we weren't thinking about as much for SEO? Where do the Venn diagrams diverge? One thing that I think is very interesting is a large difference is almost reps. So continuing to enforce the same brand identity and truth, the thing that is maybe like this is the most comfortable hoodie for working from home.

15:53to like I think what we used to sort of assume is putting up a couple blog posts that were like SEO specific on our site it was going to kind of flip the bill when it came to like background SEO work but now like what LLMs are crawling for is recent artifacts of that being the truth and so really simple but adding like dates to these blog posts to make sure that they're current and relevant really helpful and finding ways to reinforce that truth or your sort of brand identity across different mediums as well and searching for ways that you can create either earned mentions or consumer kind of customer-led mentions.

16:44So a site on its own is not really enough to have you treated favorably by these LLMs because I could make a website right now that was like, I am the best boxing coach in the world and I can really like ring it up to hopefully platform myself on LLMs. But if I don't have any earned media, so any PR placements, anyone else saying that what I'm saying is credible, then an LLM is not going to treat me as a credible source with only a website. So your actual consumer sentiment starts to matter a lot. And then real old-fashioned earned media starts to come back in a really important way because LLMs are like sort of amalgamating all of these different touch points to really put in front of you what they feel is a accurate answer to your question.

17:32And it kind of goes back to what we we have been talking about Andromeda for years as well, which is this idea of not just understanding kind of what the customer wants, but like who the customer is that wants it and why they want it, kind of creating these arcs for like the customer journey. And it's like, because these LLMs, they know, like I was saying, they know more about me than is comfortable. Even having Claude being a desktop, how I use Claude. And every time I come back, it's like, you're back at it, Eric. It's just building more trust with me that it knows me and knows me better. So it's like the conversion rates are only going to improve, but it's also looking.

18:08So when it's looking for like the best, I was actually, the one thing I've looked for is I want to wear a ring. I want to like get a nice like pinky ring kind of thing. And so, and it knows me and it, and it like, and it starts, it gave me all these options that were, cause it knows me so well. And it's looking for content that's from a voice like mine, not, not just a customer, but a customer voice like mine. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good way of putting it. Like an important part of formulating how you want to start showing up and like what type of person or what type of use case you want to have LLMs recommend you for.

18:42You really have to deeply understand who you're servicing and then understand is that delusional of you to think that you can do that. I think for some brands, it's like you might have an idea that your persona is somebody and that they, what's a good example? The Make Believe Mug Company, as per usual, it's like you might have an idea that you're talking to young professionals and they like your mugs because they are aesthetically pleasing. but if you dig into your actual consumer insights and see that it's middle-aged women and they like that mug because it's leak-proof and they throw it in a baby bag if I start producing content on my site and through organic channels and I'm really pushing this idea of young people and aesthetics I'm not going to rank favorably because what people are actually saying in real life is that the mug is leak-proof and it's great for a baby bag so that kind of tension split previously it It was just unstrategic and you were kind of getting yourself stuck in a tactical spin cycle.

19:45But now you are actively losing money in a way because you're not going to be surfaced. And it's like if you make that wrong call and you're too committed to a persona that doesn't exist or is uninterested in your product, it's not just a strategic miss anymore. It's like your brand's a flop. Goodbye. You're not going to be able to run a business. Yeah, in this area, it's not just about what you're publishing about your brand. So the brand is no longer what you publish. It is what gets summarized about you. And that summary is generated not just from what you're in control of, but it's what an LLM is learning about the audience that is attracted to you as well.

20:23So you abdicate a little bit of control of the brand in that sense. So you do have to recognize that brand storytelling is not only about what you want people to believe, but what people are believing about you a little bit. Not to put too clean a rubber on it, but yeah, it's interesting. What do we do? So with clients that come in and they want to understand this world, like what are the practical steps that brands can take to, I guess, first understand how they're showing up and then to start putting together a plan about how they want to show up and how to get there? What do we advise brands?

21:00I love this. And I feel like Daniel might too because it's really like kind of old school, real brand work. But it's really about going up a little bit and answering those questions that we were sort of just discussing. almost separating your thought process now when you think about brand and separating what is my human-focused brand storytelling piece of the pie and then what is my agentic lead shopping brand enforcement side of the pie and marrying those two together and it's something I know Eric you've talked to lots of our e-commerce strategists about and I've talked about on Adventurous time and time again which is doing the work first to understand who your target personas are and understanding your segmentation, understanding how brand storytelling sits there, and then marrying that with work around social listening, cultural insights, what are people actually saying and where is the need.

21:54And then Daniel mentioned this earlier, like the activities aren't that different, but the higher level thought has to be a little bit different. To that end, like it's a good leading question to ask a partner, a brand that you're working with. It's like, what gets you excited about creator marketing, for example? Like the old answer would have been like, oh, I get access to new audiences and like I get reach. But like what really excites us in the agentic age is like, oh, now we're like, we get to lean into experience. We get to lean into and borrow some authority from that creator. It's not just about reach and impressions.

22:32It's about third party comparisons that we can start to like pull into the net. So like, I love working with creators. I love working with creators because they recognize that what they're providing their audience is like that earned experience, that authority, that trust. And as a brand, if we're welcomed into that partnership, we can tap into it to mutual benefit. Like that's the exciting part about the creator relationship and how it's kind of like evolving, you know, to use one channel as an example. What are categories that are going to be most affected by agentic shopping? Like everyone is, which is really interesting and fun and an opportunity.

23:18But particularly, Dana was mentioning kind of CPG vitamins. They rank highly amongst what people are querying. Also consumer electronics. So what version of the iPhone should I get? Should I get an iPhone at all? What headphones should I purchase? That also ranks, I think, at the very top. It's a study based out of Boston on how people are using Agenteca at a shop. And consumer electronics was by far the top. But I think we'll start to see more uptake in apparel, more subjective verticals as well. As we continue to kind of commodify community in this digital space, I think we'll start to see more people use it for those subjective verticals.

23:58But right now, it's a lot of CPG and a lot of consumer electronics. Travel, too. For the reasons that Aves has cited, there's just a lot of reviews, a lot of comparisons, and a lot of word of mouth, right? Yeah, anything where there's a ton of information that you could take into account when making a decision, that tends to be leading the charge in a way. But I also know, I've talked to our Amazon team, and I did an adventurous episode about it as well. Like Rufus, their sort of agentic AI only on Amazon is really interesting as well because people are almost being trained, if you're an Amazon user, to use Rufus in a very specific way, which is asking for product details, asking for like more general recommendations.

24:47And I do think Amazon rolling out Rufus is going to really sort of shift and open people's eyes to how they can be using, you know, Manus, Claude, whatever they're using in a different capacity because they're already doing it with Rufus. As of last week, Rufus is dead and it is now Alexa for shopping. And like a typical Amazon way, they've gone back and forth on the name. But I think technically it's Alexa for shopping now instead of Rufus. Long live Rufus. Rufus is cute. I think it's smart. It's collapsing to Alexa. Aves, you mentioned something early on and I think it's really worth highlighting, which is the gift buying aspect.

25:23I think so many people this coming holiday season are going to be using LLMs to buy the best, you know, most unique gifts for their friends and family. What are some thoughts here in whatever we're in Q2 about really gearing up for the holiday gift buying season with these LLMs? I mean, I feel like you guys were boots on the ground, but like, do you remember those? I only remember the concept of them, like the BuzzFeed, like, here's a top 10 funny mustache T-shirts you can buy. I think we'll see a resurgence in those pay-to-play kind of article styles. Not that they ever went away, but I do think the listicles will come back in a big way.

26:00It's like very dead internet theory, but starting to think about if you've never been placed in a listicle like that and you don't have the experience to do it, that's going to be a huge one. I also think making sure that you're like including gifting language or highlighting gifting related reviews on site will be really key as well. So trying to like balance from here to Q4 both opportunities that are external to your business. So that's kind of the listicle dark posting creator stuff where you're looking for earned trust and authority. and then also starting to look at well on my site do I anywhere speak of gifting or who this is a gift for and understanding before you start doing that work like who is it a good gift for because that's like based on how people search on Amazon it's usually person forward right like gift for dad gift for a teenage girl so really digging into like the psychology of like who's buying for who and who is that final who, and starting to put information and context on your own site, and then also looking to those outward outlets.

27:11What happens? We've talked since the beginning of this podcast about the value of landing pages and funnel congruency. So when you're advertising to one of your avatars, you have an ad, and then you go to a landing page that speaks to that avatar a little bit, and then you go to checkout. With the middle part of the funnel being collapsed, does that make the landing page or the post-click experience more important or less important? That is a really interesting question. It makes it, in my experience so far, more important in a different way because your site experience now has to be cohesive to an agent operating it, right?

27:45So a lot of people aren't, I don't think, thinking about that right now. We're not like all talking about WebMCP. It's not a super sexy topic to dive into, but it's like your site needs to be optimized for agent traffic immediately because if your site can't be navigated and an LLM can't find the information that it needs, then you're not going to be surfaced, right? It's like super simple. So the stuff that we used to talk about all the time, Eric, where it was like, oh, this like ads all about this product doing X, Y, or Z. So you're going to put them on a landing page that continues that story in a way that is becoming less and less of the like name of the game is people stop doing that work and they don't want to go through like I remember at some point I was probably talking on this podcast about I was running people through like a three-stage funnel for high consideration products it was like ad advertorial fake pr pdp and people were happy to do that and now that would be absurd to pitch to any client to be like oh it's going to be ad and there's three stages so I think it's more about like back-end work and making sure this is a big one I've been talking to people about too if you rely a lot on in-cart upsells, be prepared to lose that incremental revenue if you're not thinking about how you can lace that into an agentic process.

29:06If you are, like we talk about travel and experience-focused travel agent Expedia or something, if an LLM in the back end can't operate all the options that you have on your site, it's like, what's going to happen to you? It's just going to realize it can't and then leave and float someone else. What about all of us out there who use like the in cart as their wish list right like it's just going to fundamentally change fundamentally change all the way that we shop eh that's interesting yeah yeah like abandoned cart emails another like piece of the puzzle that's so deeply impacted by this because you're not adding to cart yourself you're not doing that like here's my little secret wish list so you're not getting the opportunity to talk to that human and say here's an offer or it's almost sold out So you have to make the content so much more compelling and focused and targeted to a persona.

29:58And then, yeah, you've got to make sure you're thinking about how to add those in-card upsells. That's a big part of your business. Can we end here on some thoughts about what Pilot House can do? Like when brands come in today, what are, first of all, some ways they can start future-proofing their business? And what are some ways that we, as our bolt-on growth services, that we would help brands prepare for this future? In my opinion, it begins and ends with kind of like that user intent. We've discussed that before. That kind of like search intent really shows us what people are confused about, like what they compare, what they fear, and what they need to believe before they buy.