How Can Brands Stay Desirable in the Age of AI Agents? 2026 Guide

Originally published by Yahong Zhang, fully rewritten and updated by Hugo Rimélé (co-founder of Hapticmedia and specialist in emerging technologies and digital transformation for brands) on July 1, 2026.

From AI agents to digital twins, discover how brands are redefining commerce in 2026.

➜ Let’s discuss your customer experience

Introduction

AI-driven marketing has come a long way in just a few years. Many major brands have already embraced the technology to elevate the user experience and drive commercial performance.

Brands first experimented with conversational AI (chatbots) and programmatic advertising but 2026 marks a true turning point. A new generation of use cases is emerging that will reshape how commerce gets done: AI agents. More immersive than anything before them, they deliver direct, tangible value to consumers and brands alike. Analysts predict these agents will handle a significant share of online purchases by 2030.

At the same time, AI is completely transforming how e-commerce visuals get made. From seeing a product worn on your own body to generating full 3D models, new possibilities are opening up, virtual try-on (VTO), augmented reality, and advanced personalization among them.

This article explores these deep-running trends and looks ahead to a future where shopping experiences become ever more immersive and closer to the consumer. For brands today, the question is no longer "How do we use AI?" It's: "How do we stay desirable when AI steps in between us and our customers?"

Agentic Commerce: When AI Becomes the Buyer

What Is Agentic Commerce?

An AI agent is an autonomous system that a user entrusts with an overall goal. It plans, uses tools, and executes a sequence of actions independently until the mission is accomplished. In other words, you can delegate complex tasks to an agent, and it will complete them on its own even while you're away.

Applied to agentic commerce and AI e-commerce, this means fully or partially delegating the act of purchasing. The AI agent becomes your personal shopper: fed with your information (size, tastes, budget), it runs hyper-specific searches and picks out the best products for you. On the brand side, the logic is the same: AI becomes a salesperson, an advisor, or a personal concierge capable of assisting customers autonomously, designing made-to-order products, or managing returns. Agentic commerce refers to this AI agent dedicated to commerce, acting on behalf of users or brands.

AI Agents in Marketing: A Game-Changing Capability

One of today's biggest breakthroughs is these agents' ability to complete the purchase and pay online. Strategic partnerships have been signed between AI giants and banking and e-commerce protocols, think Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, or the protocols launched by OpenAI/Stripe and Google/Shopify enabling AI marketing agents to buy directly. These commerce agents need to understand and analyze products and product descriptions. Naturally, this new paradigm requires brands to adapt, particularly around product data structuring, security, and data protection so that AI agents can read their catalogs under optimal conditions.

The AI agent doesn't need to actually see a product to buy it: it reads the data attached to that product. But there's another dimension to AI-driven commerce evolving in parallel with agents, one that, by contrast, is built for humans and for real-world customer experience.

The Macroeconomic Stakes of Agentic Commerce

The macroeconomic projections show just how big this shift is: the market could reach $3 to $5 trillion globally by 2030 according to McKinsey, and account for 15% to 25% of U.S. e-commerce according to Bain.

Facing this disruption, brands must tackle two imperatives at once:

• Make their products perfectly machine-readable (through structured data and 3D modeling)
• Protect an emotional experience territory that AI agents can't disintermediate

It's precisely because this risk of being disintermediated by AI agents exists that brands need to tell their story and create emotional connections with customers more than ever. Here too, AI in service of marketing proves to be a relevant and powerful technology.

Customer experience remains at the heart of brand strategy.

Digital Twins: Data for the Machine, Immersion for the Human

The Digital Twin Boom of 2026

To power this consumer experience, brands are increasingly creating 3D digital clones of their products. These virtual replicas are fast becoming the norm. As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang put it at the 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026: "Everything will be represented in a virtual twin."

Tomorrow, everything will be cloned, products and consumers alike. The AI agent fundamentally depends on this pixel-perfect 3D replica to physically simulate how a product will be used, tried on, or fit into its user's life.

Digital Twins and Immersive Customer Experience

Thanks to digital twins, you'll no longer need to physically try on clothes: the AI agent will cross-reference the shopper's body-scan avatar with the product's digital twin to confirm a perfect fit. It's the ideal fusion of raw, machine-computable data and immersive visuals.

But these 3D clones of real products aren't just for AI agents' physical simulations. They benefit humans just as much, delivering high-impact, unforgettable shopping experiences from virtual showroom tours to online product trials (Virtual Try-On).

AI-Generated Visuals: Creative Agility and Hyper-Personalization

AI E-Commerce and Content Creation

Beyond 3D, AI dramatically speeds up and simplifies the creation of product videos and visuals. Thanks to AI-generated content, brand experiences are becoming ever more personalized and immersive for customers. For marketing teams, AI-generated visuals save precious time while adapting in real time to external parameters: the season, the region, a one-off event, or a highly targeted marketing need.

Case Study: Styl'IA × Cuisinella, An AI Design Coach Enhancing the Customer Experience

To see how this coexistence is already taking shape, here's a concrete example from Styl'IA, a project we built for the kitchen brand Cuisinella. In this case, the AI acts as a personal design coach and advisor. Its role is to guide and support customers so they can instantly envision themselves in their purchase. Through dynamic 3D showrooms, consumers can visualize the kitchen that truly matches their taste and their space. This friction-free journey maximizes buyer confidence: the customer then benefits from the expertise and advice of a human designer/salesperson, who steps in to finalize and validate the project with complete peace of mind. This is exactly the model brands should aim for in 2026: a seamless orchestration between AI and human expertise.

Conclusion: The Duality of Marketing in 2026

In 2026, product marketing is definitively entering an era of duality. Brands must learn to win over two radically different audiences:

• On one side, AI agents: cold, pragmatic, relentless optimizers of budgets and logistics
• On the other, the human consumer, hungry for immersive experiences, ethics, and emotion

To meet this dual challenge of marketing in 2026, brands need to fight on both fronts, building data ecosystems that are both perfectly interpretable by algorithms and deeply engaging for humans.

Winning the retail battle by 2030 won't come down to shutting AI out, but to skillfully orchestrating this coexistence. The winning brands will be the ones that feed agents with structured data while continuing to captivate humans through compelling virtual worlds.

➜ Let’s discuss your customer experience