§ Press

The AI shopping opportunity that has nothing to do with ad spend.

By Malin Gaertig · August 20, 2026

A piece I wrote for Adnews: the real AI shopping opportunity isn't buying more impressions — it's making your brand machine-readable before the agent makes the choice for you.

§ Takeaways

—AI shopping is reshaping selection before the ad auction — brand visibility now depends on machine-readable data, not just media spend.
—The brands winning are the ones that structured their product data and feeds before agents started making purchase decisions.
—Read the full article on Adnews via the link above.

§ About the author

Malin Gaertig

Malin founded MARK, an AI commerce intelligence and strategic advisory service that combines proprietary technology with 15 years of experience across growth marketing, digital, ecommerce and transformation.

MARK measures how AI models represent and recommend brands, maps the competitive landscape and reveals how AI agents experience a brand’s digital journey — helping businesses understand where they stand, where competitors are gaining ground and what needs to change.

Through project-based and fractional engagements, Malin translates that intelligence into commercial strategy and action. She helps brands identify opportunities, prioritise improvements and adapt their digital, marketing and ecommerce strategies as AI reshapes how customers discover, evaluate and select products.

MARK provides the intelligence. Malin brings the interpretation and strategic direction. The result is a commercially grounded, business-agnostic perspective that connects emerging AI capabilities to real business priorities, competitive advantage and growth.

Get your score →MARK product suite →The framework →

§ Briefing

Just in: What Australia's Trust Gap in Agentic Commerce Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents

Every week now brings a fresh batch of proof that agentic commerce is moving from slide-deck concept to live infrastructure. This week it was five stories at once: a landmark ad tech ruling, the biggest layoff in a category-leading DSP's history, an acquihire that reveals what platforms actually value in AI, a data point out of Australia that every retailer should sit with, and a payments infrastructure race that's outpacing the shopping experiences it's meant to serve. None of these stories are really separate. Read together, they say something specific about where the next twelve months are headed, and it's not the story most agentic commerce hype has been telling.

Read →

§ Briefing

Just in: What Salesforce's Claudeforce Bet Means for Brands Selling Through AI Agents

Salesforce renamed part of itself after another company's product for the first time ever. The Trade Desk moved its core interface to a conversational agent. A US newspaper group started building a version of its site no human will ever see. Read together, they're the same story: every layer of the stack that assumed a human was clicking is being rebuilt for an agent.

Read →

§ Briefing

AI Shopping Isn't a Future Behaviour. Retailers Are Already Measuring It

Two measurements from the ARC AI Summit — Bunnings' AI assistant converting at roughly twice the rate, and Shopify's AI-agent traffic tripling with 58% higher conversion — show the retail goal moving from earning the click to earning the selection.

Read →

§ Briefing

Walmart's checkout inside ChatGPT converted three times worse than its own website. It opened the door to AI agents anyway.

Why retailers open or close the door to AI shopping agents depends on where their profit sits, and what that means for the brands on their shelves.

Read →

Go deeper: Product suite · Framework guides.