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Is your business ready for a customer an AI agent sends?

What happens when I ask AI to find that person?

AI agents are starting to handle discovery and send customers to a business ready to buy. In this Field Note, Kirk Nelson of nuordinary asks the harder question: when that customer lands on your website, can they understand the offer, the price and how to check out?

Kirk Nelson, founding partner, nuordinaryDecision visibility · No. 01 · Draft for review

A crowded farmers market hall, vendors behind their counters
Fig. 01. The food building at St. Jacobs Farmers Market, Ontario. Credit

I’ve been watching something interesting happen with AI shopping. The big platforms aren’t all taking the same approach.

Some are trying to let the customer discover and complete the entire purchase inside the AI experience. Others are letting AI handle the discovery, then sending the customer back to the merchant’s own website to complete the purchase.

And honestly, I think that’s telling. We’re still figuring out what the best version of AI-powered commerce actually looks like.

Which made me think about something for businesses getting ready for this shift. Don’t assume that because the technology works, the experience works. Those are two different things.

If an AI agent sends someone to your website ready to buy, what happens next?

  • Can they understand the offer immediately?
  • Is pricing clear?
  • Can the agent find the information it needs?
  • Is checkout simple?
  • Are your products, policies and availability structured clearly enough for a machine to understand?

And what happens when something doesn’t go exactly as planned?

These are the things we’re going to have to learn. Just like we learned how to build websites for people. Then we learned how to build them so search engines could understand them. Now we’re going to have to think about how machines can understand them well enough to act on someone’s behalf.

And I don’t think anyone has the perfect playbook yet. That’s actually the interesting part.

If you’re preparing your business for agent-driven commerce, don’t just ask:

“Is my technology ready?”

Ask:

“If an AI sends me a customer who already wants to buy, is my business ready for that customer?”

Because turning the technology on is probably the easy part. Designing the experience around it is where the real work begins.