AI is now the front door to commerce, and it got there by having nothing to sell. Whether it keeps sending shoppers your way depends on how you deliver.
First of all, thank you to Stord for hosting Future Commerce at the Spring 2026 Stord Summit, and for the opportunity to share our latest research on how AI is reshaping the way consumers discover, evaluate, and buy.
There was one slide in that presentation that deserved a longer pause than it got. It showed how much consumers trust AI compared to the channels brands have spent two decades paying for. In our survey of 1,000 US consumers, people told us they trust AI more than or equally to search engines (65%), brand websites (63%), social media (52%), ads (46%), and influencers (45%).
The influencer number was the one that made us pause. Creators have spent a decade building the machinery of digital trust through faces, lifestyles, comment sections, and parasocial intimacy at scale. Their entire reason for being is rooted in trust, and they are now tied with a tool that has no face, no story, and no humanity. One that doesn’t particularly care whether you buy anything at all.
The reason came through clearly in our research. People are gravitating towards AI because they feel the platforms have no skin in the game. Their job is simply to aggregate the best, most trusted data and present it based on the context you’ve shared. While creators benefit from having a personality and distinct aesthetic that consumers can connect with, they are lagging in authenticity and objectivity.
The Shift Started Before AI Showed Up
Last December, we asked a bold question in our newsletter: Is this the cultural decline of TikTok? For years, the narrative had been that TikTok is where culture and discovery happen. Data even suggested that the short-from video platform would eventually eat traditional search’s lunch. We pushed back on that notion for a long time, but the data has finally caught up with our instincts. Sensor Tower’s daily download rankings showed TikTok sliding down the charts, falling as low as #37 in January. App deletions jumped 150% after the ownership changeover, and Harris Poll found that 60% of Gen Z, TikTok's largest user base, said they trusted the platform less than they used to.
The bigger story underneath this TikTok platform shift is that media diets are more fragmented than ever. Our survey of 1,000 consumers across the US, Europe, and Australia found that there is no single platform dominating the discovery and research stages of the shopping journey. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube led discovery on average, while TikTok, Pinterest, Google, and ChatGPT each pulled meaningful shares at different stages. Consumers are flocking to different destinations for entertainment, education, and influence, with each reflecting a distinct mode and mindset.
Consumers are interacting with commerce everywhere, which further validates our core thesis at Future Commerce: commerce is culture. What we buy reflects who we are, what we believe, who we want to become, and how we want to be perceived. As a result, shopping is not just something we do. It’s something we are. Our New Modes research bears this idea out. Nearly half of consumers told us they’re always keeping a mental list of things to buy, whether or not they're technically “in market.”
Millennials, interestingly, showed the strongest signals of perpetual purchase consideration. As a millennial myself, I can vouch for this firsthand. We’re at the stage where we're buying for our kids, our spouses, and sometimes our parents, with twenty to thirty tabs open in our brains at any given moment. And the most seismic shift in our research over the past six months is that AI has become the support system for exactly this mindset. When consumers described what shopping with AI felt like, the phrase that came up again and again was that it eases the mental load of having to do it all. That emotional reality matters more than any feature comparison.
Why the Influencer Spell Broke
In the early days of creator culture, following someone felt like getting a tip from a friend who had genuinely tried the product and liked it enough to tell you about it. That feeling of closeness was the foundation of the entire model; it’s why influencer marketing worked. And those parasocial relationships ultimately turned Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok into commerce platforms.
But that trust and credibility is fragile, and the business model has always been in tension with it. With every disclosed sponsorship, affiliate code, and suspiciously glowing haul video, consumers are left asking the same question: Did someone pay for this? If that’s the immediate reflect, the recommendation stops working even if the surface-level relationship, in the form of a follow, survives.
Our data captures the dichotomy directly. Some consumers told us influencers always seem like they're trying to sell something, while AI isn't. Others still lean into the authenticity of their favorite creators, the aesthetic, the life they relate to or aspire to. But everyone now knows the creators are monetizing the feed. And the trust gradient that opens up is decisive.
What has struck me most in our consumer research is the language consumers have used when asked how shopping with AI actually feels. In our holiday survey of 1,000 consumers, they reached for words like “companion” and “personal shopper.” The parasocial relationships people built with influencers are shifting toward psychosocial relationships with their AI of choice.
You Can’t Buy Your Way Into This Channel
For the past 20 years, brands could buy their way into discovery. Google sold keywords, Amazon charged listing fees and took margin on ads, and social platforms sold reach, first cheaply and then expensively. Brands paid at every layer because there was no other way through. But currently, there’s no reliable, paid placement inside an AI recommendation. There’s no affiliate architecture behind an answer, and no sponsored ranking. The only way into AI-powered conversations is to earn your place.
And the consumers AI platforms send to branded sites behave differently. Basket sizes are still small, but the conviction is unmistakable, and our research found that AI-recommended products carry a 16% higher conversion rate overall. These are shoppers arriving with their research already done and their decision mostly made, often landing directly on a specific product page.
The Intermediation Myth
The fear in every boardroom is that AI will cut the brand completely out of the equation. We call this the intermediation myth because our data tells the opposite story.
77% of consumers who received an AI recommendation still clicked through to the brand’s e-commerce site to continue researching, compare products, and experience the brand before making the final purchase. As my co-founder, Phillip Jackson, put it during our fireside chat, your brand has been reduced to a chat box in an AI conversation. If the shopper never clicks through, they never experience your brand at all. AI has effectively become the front door to commerce, but your site is still where the relationship happens.
The same conviction that makes AI shoppers so valuable also makes them less forgiving. They arrive with higher intent, higher expectations, and much lower tolerance for friction. In our research, 58% of consumers said a poor website experience from a brand they love actively bothers them. And the gaps that lose them are often basic, such as unclear delivery practices, buried return policies, and hidden FAQs.
Trust Is Won or Lost After the Buy Button
If you take one line from our fireside chat, take this one from Phillip: “The post-purchase window is where trust is confirmed or broken.”
AI brought the shopper to your door. Your site converted them. The delivery promise, the tracking experience, the unboxing, and the returns process determine whether the whole chain of trust holds, and whether the signals feeding the next AI recommendation work for you or against you.
And these post-purchase experiences have a long-term impact because AI reads the public record of how you actually perform. Reviews, sentiment, customer complaints, and delivery experiences are all part of the new “intelligence engine.” As a result, a late delivery, which historically was deemed “one bad customer experience,” is now a data point that nudges an AI recommendation toward a competitor. A big marketing budget and clever creative can’t fix what operations break.
A team wouldn’t tolerate a paid campaign that underperformed by 20%, and they shouldn’t tolerate a fulfillment operation that drags review scores down by the same margin. Because if your current operation can’t consistently keep the delivery promise your customers expect, that’s a back-office problem that ultimately turns intoa discoverability problem. And frankly, it deserves the same urgency and the right partners that brands have always brought to their acquisition channels.
Your Site Has a New Job to Do
The shopper arriving from AI just came from a contextual, conversational experience. Dropping them onto a static page squanders everything that brought them there. Future Commerce predicts that the e-commerce site will evolve from a transaction engine into a trust-building environment, richer in storytelling, UGC, and the kind of contextual content shoppers used to get from social. This is how brands can shape traffic with good friction.
Branded bot experiences, how-to-use and how-to-style content, and post-purchase engagement that fits the mental state your customer is in at that moment, also continue the contextual experience they started with their AI. Think about what you can provide on-site at every step after the order, whether that’s delivery updates, installation guidance, or aspirational content. This is how trust is nurtured once consumers hit the “buy” button.
But as you build, remember that consumers are complicated and their expectations are sometimes contradictory. In our New Modes research, they asked for more deals relevant to their preferences (42%) and more recommendations based on purchase history (35%) and search history (34%), while also asking for fewer cart abandonment emails (27%), fewer location-based notifications (22%), and less AI-driven search on brand sites (21%).
Consumers like AI, but on their terms. Personalization wins when it’s transparent and genuinely useful, and turns people off the moment it feels imposed. One warning Phillip offered for free is that if you make the experience too frictionless, you just push all the pain downstream to your CX team. Measure the friction and encourage consumers to slow down intentionally.
Of course, this data only represents the present state. Advertising is making its way into these platforms, and agentic checkout may completely reshape transaction flows. But the brands that provide fast delivery, accurate inventory, painless returns, and genuine reviews are building a track record that endures even after the paid layer is added. Those who wait for ad units will enter a channel where their competitors' operational credibility is already baked in.
The Most Honest Era Commerce Has Ever Had
For decades, there has been a gap between what brands say and what brands do, and an entire industry has existed to manage it. Creative covered for slow shipping. Paid reach covered for thin reviews. A good campaign could outrun a bad experience for quarters at a time.
That faceless tool we started with, the one with no story to sell, closes that gap, because it can’t read the promise. It can only read the performance.
In a strange way, AI is forcing commerce to become what marketing always claimed it was. The story and the operation finally have to be the same thing. I’d argue that’s the best news operators have heard in a long time. For two decades, discovery went to the brands with the deepest media budgets. In this channel, it goes to the brands with the best track records. And track records only compound over time. Every on-time delivery, every accurate product page, every painless return is a deposit in an account that no competitor’s ad spend can draw down, and that keeps paying out after the toll booths arrive.
So the question “Why do consumers trust AI, and how can brands earn its recommendation?” has a more precise answer than “keep up with the technology.” Your brand needs to become the most trusted voice in commerce that technology can honestly vouch for.
The faceless influencer is already forming its opinion of you, one shipment at a time. Give it a good story to tell.
