If customers don’t see it, they won’t buy it. Food brands have always worked hard to gain visibility into where shopping decisions are made. For decades, this has meant having the right aisles, the right height, the right placement and an eye-catching package design. But what does shelf visibility look like when an AI agent helps you make a selection or places an order?
Salesforce 39% of consumers (and more than half of Gen Z) say they are already using AI for product searches. And we’re starting to see shopping assistants that can do more than answer questions, including processing purchases and checkouts. AlbertsonsFor example, we launched an AI assistant that can help you plan meals and restock essentials. walmart We are investing in ‘super agents’ across our shoppers, employees and suppliers. amazon Rufus lets you take a hand-written grocery list and add items to your cart, and supports price tracking and automatic purchase actions.
That doesn’t mean most people will hand over their entire weekly store next year. Bane It is currently estimated that only 24% of U.S. consumers would be comfortable purchasing from an AI agent. Repeatable replenishment is the obvious entry point. When it comes to essentials, many shoppers just want “the usual,” and early AI-driven purchasing is most evident in grocery and consumer goods.
What “visibility” looks like when an agent makes a choice
As shoppers select items, shelf visibility depends on placement and persuasion. To a shopping agency, a “shelf” looks like a checklist. The choice must fit the shopper’s rules, budget, and delivery expectations. Advertising is still important, but agents don’t ‘buy’ traditional products like human shoppers do. And your agent can’t pick something your tool can’t check. especially Inventory and fulfillment system.
For food brands, “machine visibility” depends on whether agents can confidently answer “yes” to four practical questions:
- Does this fit the house rules? Ingredients and allergens are more important here. Missing or inconsistent fields make it more difficult to select products. GS1 USA They noted that there is a demand for scannable codes that display details such as ingredients, allergens, safety information and recall warnings.
- Can it be fulfilled where the buyer wants? Agents tend to stick to items that they can reliably get to the right place on time. Substitutions are common in grocery stores, but repeated substitutions make it harder for a product to become the default choice.
- Does the price match what the buyer requested? Price thresholds and “buy when it drops” behavior naturally lend themselves to assistants. Alexa+ adds auto-purchase style shopping based on price requirements.
- Is it safe to choose without going through the back and forth? Agents need to feel confident about what’s in the product and what the label claims. This caution is consistent with the market. NACSreported a 93% increase in FDA recalls involving foreign substances year-to-date (January through April 2025 compared to the same period in 2024).
If your product seems unclear to an agent, shoppers may skip it early in the process, even if they were willing to pick it off the shelf.
Basic things to add to your shopping cart
AI agents focus on consistent product data and accurate inventory quantities.
To make it “machine-visible”:
- Edit product information (ingredients, allergens, nutrition panel, pack size, GTIN) at the source and maintain consistency across important retailer feeds.
- Track inventory across all locations that can fulfill orders: your own warehouse, 3PL, and retailer programs. See what’s reserved and what’s available.
- Set clear fallback rules for each channel. Some items are easy to replace and others are not, so this will help you decide before a spike occurs.
- Maintain safety and traceability records that can be easily retrieved when requested by partners or regulators.
This is something like an inventory management system. katana They tend to appear in stacks. It sits alongside your ecommerce tools, 3PL, and accounting systems and provides one place for your team to view orders and inventory across multiple locations. Confirmed orders can also be sent directly to fulfillment or production, helping to prevent counts from drifting between systems.
Katana’s 2025 data Inventory values for approximately 1,500 product businesses have increased by more than 60% month-on-month through 2025, including non-peak periods. When inventory moves that much, a slight delay can easily result in missed reorders or unwanted replacements.
Grocery shopping will be a personal affair for a long time, especially when it comes to food. Buying an agent will probably feel boring before it feels great. Still, for food brands, “boredom” is where a lot of their sales come from, making “machine visibility” increasingly difficult to ignore.
