Pernod Ricard’s experience illustrates a fundamental shift facing every brand. Over the past two decades brands learned to optimize their keyword strategies so that they would appear at the top of search engine results. They now face a new challenge: optimizing for AI. As Karaca and his team found, many consumers already use LLMs to research products or compare prices. A July 2025 survey of 750 U.S. consumers, conducted by the management consulting firm Kearney, found that 60% of shoppers expect to use agentic AI to make purchases within the next 12 months. Every major AI company is developing agents in anticipation of mainstream adoption. To cite one example, OpenAI is collaborating with payment processors likeStripeandPayPaland retailers likeWalmartand the shopping platformShopifyto facilitate purchasing within ChatGPT. It is laying the groundwork for an automated and complete customer journey. That means companies will soon be managing their brands in an era when agentic AI, built on top of LLMs, works on behalf of customers, completing transactions without human assistance.