Holden Bale runs strategy at Merkle, the dentsu-owned consulting firm with roughly 16,000 people worldwide and about 4,000 of them sitting in data science. He came on to walk through what Merkle's consumer research actually shows about AI and shopping. The numbers do not line up with the conference talk track.

Twenty-two percent of consumers across North America, Central America and most of EMEA now name an AI app as a first stop for product search and evaluation. Google still sits around 78 percent, Amazon around 49. More than half of men and over a third of women say they already use AI tools to shop. That is self-reported, and Holden is the first to discount it.

The gap brands keep missing is what happens after discovery. Fifty-three percent say they leave the AI app and buy on a website. Eleven percent claim they bought inside the app. Holden says that second number is fiction, and explains why the GMV math cannot carry it. He has a slide he brings to conferences in red type: agentic commerce does not exist.

Then he gives the forecast anyway. A quarter of an eight trillion dollar B2C market flowing through discrete AI apps by the end of the decade, most of that share taken out of marketplaces. Somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of commerce running autonomously. The condition for all of it is Amazon and the LLM firms working out a commercial arrangement instead of a lawsuit.

One more number worth sitting with. Merkle surveyed 100-plus companies above a billion dollars in revenue. Eighty-eight percent had deployed something powered by a large language model. Six percent could prove it moved EBITDA.

Holden's advice to brand executives has almost nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the product data most companies still cannot pull out of nineteen different systems.

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Chapters

00:00 What Merkle actually does, and why strategy and execution stopped being separate jobs

03:15 The Shoptalk data: AI is eating search, not shopping

06:11 Is AI traffic invisible, or are brands just not tracking it

08:25 The social commerce comparison, and why perceived attribution matters

11:36 Avalara

13:07 The 2030 forecast: 25 percent inside AI apps, 10 to 25 percent autonomous

16:47 Who has time to train a personal AI

17:49 Order history is the one thing the LLMs do not have

21:34 What a brand executive should start now

24:34 Test and learn, minus the learn