Agentic Commerce Is Coming. The Winners Will Be the Brands With the Best Customer Truth.

For years, marketers optimized for search engines.

Soon, they will be optimizing for AI agents.

According to the latest Juniper Research Agentic Commerce Market 2026-2031 report, the number of people using agentic commerce is expected to grow from fewer than 300 million users in 2026 to 1.3 billion users by 2031. Juniper also forecasts explosive growth in transaction value as AI agents increasingly discover products, compare options, negotiate purchases, and complete transactions on behalf of consumers.

That forecast should change the way every CMO thinks about marketing.

Marketing Will Have to Persuade AI, Not Just Humans

Until now, marketing has been designed to persuade humans.

Tomorrow, much of it will also need to persuade AI.

An AI shopping agent does not care about clever headlines or emotional slogans. It looks for evidence.

Which products solve the customer's problem?

Which claims are consistently supported?

Which objections appear repeatedly?

Which experiences create trust?

Today's Marketing Systems Can Tell You What. Not Why.

Today's marketing systems struggle to answer those questions because they rely on CRM records, website analytics, surveys, and campaign metrics. Those tools tell you what happened.

They rarely explain why.

First-Party Customer Truth Is the Missing Ingredient

The missing ingredient is first-party customer truth.

Every customer conversation contains information that no clickstream can capture. Buyers explain why they hesitate, what almost stopped them from purchasing, what gave them conviction, and why they chose one product over another. Those conversations contain the evidence that future AI agents will need to make intelligent recommendations.

This is where ReadingMinds fits.

ReadingMinds transforms voice interviews into structured, governed customer evidence. Every insight is backed by customer quotes, source recordings, observable expression signals, confidence levels, and complete traceability.

Read more about how we handle data, retention, and privacy in our Trust & Compliance Center.

The Three Layers of Marketing in the Agentic Era

As agentic commerce grows, marketing itself will split into three layers.

The first is the agent interface, where humans and AI interact.

The second is the action workflow, where agents execute campaigns, recommendations, and transactions.

The third, and ultimately the most valuable, is trusted customer evidence.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, Google, and AWS are competing to own the first two layers.

ReadingMinds is building the third.

Because in the age of agentic commerce, the companies that win will not simply have smarter AI.

They will have AI grounded in something far more valuable: the authentic voice of their customers.

If you want to hear what the third layer sounds like in practice, start a free 3-minute Live Test Drive and let Emma capture the kind of customer truth an agentic-era marketing stack will need.