When You're Not in the Room

A growing share of customers now meet your business through an AI assistant first.

Sep 08, 2026

“Clarity was always good manners. Now it's also good strategy.” — Nadina D. Lisbon

Hello Sip Savants! 👋🏾

Synchrony and OpenAI announced that they are utilizing ChatGPT to provide financing, rewards, and loyalty programs directly in the shopping experience and marketplace offers in individual shopping conversations [1]. Synchrony Marketplace adopts the preservation of consumer and merchant choice as commerce increasingly relies on agents, which is an interesting and anomalous phrase. More customers interact with a business's assistant before interacting with the website, and Adobe reported that those customers are higher quality. Adobe also reported that in March, customers from AI-based searches converted at a rate 42% better over all other customer traffic, which in fact was a complete reversal from the prior year which saw those customers converting at a rate 38% worse [2]. The following three items concern that shift.

3 Tech Bites

🔎 Discovery moved into the conversation
- Synchrony made an enterprise collaboration announcement with OpenAI on August 17, and brought financing, rewards, and loyalty into AI-native shopping with a ChatGPT plugin that allows shoppers to access Marketplace offers within the chat [1]. The company emphasized the importance of infusing agency and control for merchants and shoppers, which is a positive development for agentic commerce. However, note where the industry has settled at, for example, OpenAI retired their in-chat Instant Checkout in March and now sends shoppers to the merchant's checkout while they focus on discovery [3]. The buying still happens on your site, but increasingly, the deciding does not.
📈 The traffic is already arriving, and it’s warm
- According to Adobe, by the end of Q1 2026, US retail site traffic originating from AI sources (which, according to their data, engaged in 48% longer purchasing sessions and viewed 13% more pages per session) grew 393% YoY [2]. Mid-August data showed July's AI-referral traffic increased 62% YoY and converted at a 60% better rate than non-AI traffic [4].
🧩 A shared way for agents and merchants to talk
- On January 11, 2026, Shopify and Google, in collaboration, published the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), aimed at providing an open standard for AI agents to interface with merchants and discover what a business supports. The agents can interface and negotiate with merchants who publish their capabilities under /.well-known/ucp on their websites [5]. It has the support of Etsy, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, and millions of Shopify merchants.

5-Minute Strategy

🧠 Read Your Own Reference

While you are most likely busy, an assistant is probably out there speaking of your company to someone that has never heard of you before. They probably won’t spend any more than 5 minutes on it, which is less time than it would take you to send them as well. This is how you get some information:

Open your assistant of choice, and ask it to give you a description of what your company does, as well as why someone would use it.
From there ask where did they get that from. Most assistants will name/link their sources.
Have a look at the sources and see who you are competing against. Your site, an analyst, a review aggregator or even a competitor’s comparison page.
Look at the answer you got and note how much of it was assembled by others.
Keep their source list, it’s a list of who is currently describing your company.

You are not testing a technology, you are finding out who is your reference writer.

1 Big Idea

💡 Speaking Well of You

Reputation is the thing that happens when you’re not around, and you often hear about it second-hand. A customer tells a friend. A friend responds. If you find out at all. What is new is not that people discuss your business when you are not around. What is new is that something is always on and ready to respond.

The good news is who shows up later. People who come as a result of an AI assistant are not drive-by clicks. They view 13% more pages [2], stay 48% longer, and by Adobe’s July figures, they also converted 60% better and spent 53% more per visit than everyone else [4]. Adobe also found that 39% of consumers have used AI to shop and that 85% of those said it made the experience better [2]. The assistant did most of the work, thus the person comes to your page with a great deal of interest.

A tool can only say so much about you based on its own capabilities. Adobe developed a tool to find out how much of a page a language model can digest and saw that the average page for a US-based retailer was somewhere around 75% of a page, while individual product pages came in at around 66% [2]. Of course, they are going to be the hardest to digest. This actually is quite useful. This is why the development of open standards, such as the Universal Commerce Protocol, is actually useful to both merchants and agents. Agents can read what the merchants have to say, and both sides can figure out what actually works [5].

This is actually quite enjoyable to think about. A page that is hard for a machine to digest is usually quite hard to digest for a human as well. For Adobe, the clearest pages for the average retail site were the help center and the returns page, coming in at 79% and 82% respectively [2]. This is for the simple reason that these pages are concise and to the point. Nobody actually wants you to write for machines. The actual better idea is to write clearly.

So underneath all of this, the big question is something that’s been around for a long long time. While it hides in different forms and clothes, it is that age old question in business. What do you want people to say about you when you’re out of the room? All the generations of merchants before this one claimed that spot with a sign, a storefront, a good phone manner, a trained front desk staff. This generation gets to answer it honestly with their own descriptions and coherent pages. That really is a good problem to have.

If you do a little self evaluation and it tells you something that caught you off guard, feel free to share your findings. I read every response.

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