LONDON — Is friction the fundamental mechanism of advertising, stopping a consumer in their tracks to show them something they did not ask for?
Many in the industry have long sought to make ads a complement to user activity.
Now “agentic commerce”, where AI software acts on behalf of consumers to find and purchase goods, suggests a future where promotional messaging must be woven into the fabric of a machine’s decision-making process.
“Today, the way I’d bluntly describe advertising is ads interrupt,” said Rahul Choraria, CEO of Pacvue, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Tomorrow, I believe ads are going to assist, where they’re going to be naturally embedded in the search process, the conversation process, and ultimately the shopping process.”
Collapsing the sales funnel
Pacvue is a software company that specializes in providing tools for e-commerce advertising and intelligence. Their platform empowers marketers to optimize their campaigns across various online marketplaces, such as Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart. Their services include analytics, automation, and management solutions for search and display advertising.
The urgency to adopt these automated systems is being driven by a fundamental change in consumer behavior, particularly on social platforms where discovery and purchase occur almost simultaneously.
“The funnel’s collapsed,” Choraria said. “If you think about the consumer today, they are discovering, they are evaluating, and in many cases, they are shopping in the same moment, often in the same platform.”
This compression offers retail media networks a distinct advantage as the “connective tissue” of the industry, though it creates a data fragmentation problem for advertisers trying to measure true incrementality. With eMarketer projecting U.S. retail media spend to reach $69.33 billion by 2026, brands are under pressure to unify these disparate signals to understand which investments are actually driving profitable outcomes.
Democratizing the long tail
While the industry giants, Amazon and Walmart, historically dominated the first waves of retail media due to their massive scale, the next phase may allow smaller players to catch up.
“What was once too small to matter is going to really start to add up at scale,” Choraria said. He noted that AI significantly reduces the cost of entry, allowing brands to set up, execute, and measure campaigns across a “long tail” of retailers without the administrative burden that previously stifled diversification.
This suggests a potential flattening of the playing field, where the “smartest retailers” can leverage automation to attract demand that would otherwise flow solely to the largest aggregators. “We are all in on these trends, making significant investments to transform our own business from a retail media powerhouse to an AI-powered commerce operating system,” Choraria said.
You’re watching coverage from Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit with WPP Media, filmed in London, presented by Criteo, Index Exchange, Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
