LAS VEGAS – Agentic commerce is expanding how consumers shop rather than replacing existing channels, says Michael Komasinski, chief executive of adtech firm Criteo.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Komasinski said AI-powered assistants should be viewed as an incremental layer that complements search, social and retail media, not a substitute for them.
“Traditional search has been fragmenting for years,” Komasinski said, pointing to consumer behavior that already spans Reddit, retail marketplaces and peer-to-peer discovery. Agentic tools, he said, excel at answering complex questions that conventional search struggles to address, filling an unmet need rather than displacing existing habits.
Criteo research underscores that overlap. In a recent U.S. consumer survey, 40% of respondents said they used an AI assistant to help with holiday shopping. Yet 96% of those same consumers also relied on traditional search, social platforms and retail sites during the same purchase journeys.
“The math proves it’s incremental,” Komasinski said. “People are adding new tools, not abandoning the old ones.”
Discovery becomes distributed
As discovery spreads across more services, Komasinski said brands must rethink what it means to be “findable” in agentic journeys. Where marketers once concentrated spend on a handful of dominant search platforms, discovery is becoming far more distributed.
Future touchpoints will include prompt-based agentic interfaces embedded across retail sites, apps and other digital consumer environments, he said. Success will hinge on data quality.
Brands need accurate, real-time product metadata on imagery, pricing, availability and location delivered through reliable feeds.
“It all comes back to data,” Komasinski said. “That’s what will power discoverability in a fragmented ecosystem.”
Retailers must rethink the front end
Komasinski said retailers adopting AI assistants face rising consumer expectations shaped by best-in-class experiences elsewhere, including conversational platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Consumers will increasingly expect intuitive, dialogue-driven interactions across retail, banking and other digital services. The retailers that succeed, he said, will tightly integrate chat experiences with merchandising, loyalty programs, checkout, fulfillment and customer service.
He likened the opportunity to re-creating a personal shopper digitally.
“It’s about making that experience central to the shopping journey,” Komasinski said.
Why advertising wins in agentic environments
As debate continues over how large language model platforms will monetize at scale, Komasinski said advertising is the only model capable of supporting the economics required.
Lower-margin approaches such as affiliate fees, he argued, lack the scale to generate meaningful revenue and tend to shift profit rather than grow the category. Advertising, when done well, enables brands to surface relevant products at moments of genuine utility for consumers.
“Advertising is a growth flywheel,” Komasinski said. “It’s not an attack on the experience when it’s executed properly.”
Criteo’s role in the commerce intelligence layer
Looking ahead, Komasinski said Criteo is focused on building a commerce intelligence layer that surfaces high-quality data to power discoverability across agentic and traditional channels.
That capability will sit alongside the company’s broader cross-channel performance offerings, with agentic discovery becoming one component of a larger product suite.
Consumer adoption is poised to accelerate, he added. “That 40% stat will be much higher when we meet a year from now,” Komasinski said. “Our goal is to be powering that discoverability at scale for merchants.”
The comments reflect a broader industry view emerging at CES 2026: agentic commerce is reshaping how consumers navigate choice, but it is doing so by layering onto, rather than dismantling, the existing digital marketplace.
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