Editorial
AI has become an integral part of today’s online shopping experience, whether that’s through product recommendations by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, via Amazon’s Buy For Me shopping agent or with Google’s Gemini-enhanced web searches. Why click through countless links and retailer websites to find the perfect product when AI can deliver to you the top, best options with a quick natural language prompt? In fact, research from Salesforce found that nearly 40% of all consumers rely on AI to find new products.
In addition to making product discovery far more intuitive and convenient for consumers, agentic AI can also help consumers save more money while they’re shopping online. It can help address one of the key drawbacks to loyalty programs as well: today’s online shoppers still struggle to fully take advantage of the rewards provided by their loyalty programs. In fact, more than $360 billion worth of credit card points and miles is estimated to currently be sitting, unredeemed, in customer accounts.
Empowering AI agents with data from loyalty programs could help alleviate this backlog of benefits by enabling them to apply those contextual savings at the moment of purchase intent, delivering a more rewarding experience for consumers. What’s more, LLMs such as OpenAI and Anthropic could launch their own branded rewards programs using affiliate commissions as shopping rewards to enhance the user experience, driving more loyalty and monetization.
Why AI Shopping Tools Are a Game-Changer for Convenience and Cost
The era of AI-assisted shopping, through shopping agents or AI chatbots, is likely to put an end to the time-consuming process of finding the products online via vigorous Googling or by combing through countless individual retailer websites.
Today’s consumers can rapidly uncover both a wider range of products and items more specifically related to their search, easily compare features to narrow their preferred options and even receive personalized recommendations for new products based on their purchase history and preferences.
This is a feature customers are clamoring for. A Capgemini report found that nearly three-quarters (71%) of consumers are amenable to an AI-empowered shopping experience, with 58% of them already utilizing AI tools to recommend products. That’s more than double the 25% of shoppers who employed AI technology for such purposes just two years ago.
Related Article: How AI Fights $103 Billion in Retail Returns Fraud: Predictive & Generative Solutions
How AI Agents Can Maximize Loyalty Rewards Automatically
According to a survey conducted by Citi, a staggering 95% of shoppers have spent time looking up discounts and promotional codes to save money on their online purchases, and take an average of 19 minutes to do so. Integrating loyalty program features into the AI agent’s existing functionality would enable it to automatically surface or take advantage of deals, benefits and rewards at the moment of purchase, saving the customer both time and money.
And just as AI agents have instigated a fundamental shift in how online shoppers discover, compare and decide on what they want to buy, these agents can similarly reverse the current loyalty portal dynamic. Instead of passively waiting for members to navigate to and interact with these portals, AI agents can actively push the loyalty program experience and its associated rewards to members at the moment of intent.
Similarly, enabling shopping rewards from merchants on AI-assisted or agentic commerce transactions offers a contextual and rewarding value-add for shoppers at the point of purchase.
New Revenue Opportunities for Brands and Platforms Alike
Shoppers and loyalty program members wouldn’t be the only ones to benefit from the integration of loyalty programs and AI. This added functionality could prove lucrative to both large language model providers and retail brands.
Retail brands, for example, would be afforded a new monetization pathway, one that does not rely on ad sales. Rather than pay using existing advertising models like paid search, display ads and sponsored content, brands would instead only remit payment to an affiliate publisher, in this case, the LLM platform that operates the AI agent when a sale is actually made from the merchant whose products they are promoting. This cost effectively becomes a transparent, performance-based commission for the merchant, replacing the rather opaque process of buying ad space in hopes that those impressions and clicks translate into a product purchase.
In doing so, brands would likely experience higher sales conversion rates, because customers would be able to see how much cash back they’d receive right at the start of the discovery phase and then shop accordingly. Those customers would also be likely to spend more at checkout in order to maximize their cash back rewards. This has been proven out on other surfaces: in a CJ study on the impact of browser extensions, shoppers who received extension alerts were 64% more likely to complete a purchase and had average order values 65% higher than those who did not see a message. And in Wildfire’s own consumer research, we found that 60% of shoppers using browser extensions report spending more when they get a deal.
Given these statistics, there’s no reason it wouldn’t play out the same way through an AI interface. What’s more, being included in chatbot responses with affiliate links or embedding affiliate links in agentic transactions could enable retailers to recapture sales that would have previously been made via Google searches. This is good news for brands: according to EMARKETER, click-through rates on top ranked search terms have cratered 45% YoY after the implementation of Google’s AI overviews on search results pages.
LLM platforms also benefit from additional monetization avenues. It’s no secret these platforms are ludicrously expensive to build and operate — just having ChatGPT say “please” and “thank you” infamously costs “tens of millions” of dollars, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Affiliate commissions, however, would serve as a complementary revenue stream to the platform’s existing subscription services.
Monetized affiliate links wouldn’t need to be restricted to paying customers either. Free-tier users (which make up a vast majority of these tools’ clientele) would begin generating income for the platform as well. What’s more, a platform could even create their own in-house cash back rewards program using affiliate commissions to pay users rewards, driving more loyalty and creating an incentive for users to continue using the platform itself.
Related Article: Reimagining Ecommerce with AI: Fast Transactions, Fun Interactions
Transparency Is Key to Trust in AI Shopping Experiences
The intersection of product recommendations and affiliate commissions can be a messy one, mainly because the affiliate model alone can’t guarantee that an AI agent’s recommendations are, or will remain, unbiased. Customers may wonder, “Is this AI agent recommending this specific product to me because it's about to take a cut of the sale, or does it really have my best interests at heart?”
According to WeCanTrack, more than 60% of consumers surveyed are more inclined to shop from platforms that transparently disclose how they are compensated. Allaying customer concerns and maintaining transparency throughout the process will prove critical to ensuring user trust and alignment.
Webinar
Oct
16
Agentic AI Playbook: Real-World Customer Service Use Cases You Can Deploy Now
Boost self-service by 30% and slash call volume by 63% with agentic AI.
Register
Webinar
Oct
22
Beyond Storage: Smarter Content, Bigger Impact with DAM + AI
Discover how the DAM + AI duo makes content smarter, stronger and more accessible.
Register
Webinar
Nov
6
Fix the Content Bottleneck: Build a Better WebOps Strategy
Content stalled? Dev overloaded? You’re not the only one. Learn how streamlined WebOps bridges the publishing gap.
Register
Webinar
On demand
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
AI agents and chatbots are revolutionizing how consumers shop online. By empowering these tools with monetized links, and creating rewards programs by providing embedded, contextual savings to consumers as they make their purchases, AI tools can drive user loyalty and create new, performance-based revenue streams. However, this process must remain fully transparent to the consumer. If shoppers don’t trust that the system is unbiased, they may simply take their business elsewhere.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
