Loyalty Must Leave the Corner Before Agents Rewrite Commerce, Says Epsilon’s Hicks
If AI agents end up doing more of the shopping for consumers, the loyalty programs that brands built around apps, inboxes and points balances may need rebuilding within a few years. Gartner predicts 60% of brands will use agentic AI to deliver one-to-one interactions by 2028.
Not everyone expects loyalty to survive intact. According to Emarketer, 44% of retail executives worldwide think generative AI will weaken brand loyalty by steering choice toward value and fit. Others argue loyalty programs are gaining importance because they hold consented, purchase-linked first-party data, as Emarketer’s loyalty analysis notes.
“Agentic commerce is going to disrupt everything we know and love as it exists,” said Heather Hicks, MD, growth technology, Epsilon, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Every brand app, every commerce experience, every search engine, every CRM strategy is going to look radically different.”
Points are only the plumbing
Hicks, who said she has been in loyalty marketing “for a long time,” told David Kaplan, contributor, Beet.TV, that “rewards and points and promotions are always going to be important because they’re the mechanics of the program.”
What has changed, she said, is that brands now have “so much more insight and so much more texture” about customers. “We have the opportunity to use partners and data and insights from the customers that happen well outside of our four walls that actually now informs what we’re going to be doing inside our overall strategy,” Hicks said.
“And that strategy is not just about reward mechanics, but it’s about how we engage with the customer and deliver on the right experience,” she said. She described loyalty as “the connection between all of marketing” and “the predecessor to all first-party data.”
Two sets of priorities
Asked how brands balance customer value against long-term, profitable relationships, Hicks kept it simple. “Loyalty is a value exchange. Everybody has to win in the equation,” she said.
For brands, she said, that starts with “the clarity of understanding what the business drivers are and what’s needed right now and in the future.” The goal of the moment, Hicks said, “in some cases it might be acquisition, in some cases it might be retention, in some cases it might be footfall.”
The harder part may be the customer side, where a brand’s quarterly target counts for little. Brands “have to layer that on to what the customer actually cares about in that moment, which often has nothing to do with what we care about,” she said.
From the corner to the spotlight
Hicks said loyalty measurement changes as new technologies and data arrive, and that connected identity across paid, owned and shared environments will change how loyalty marketers work. “It moves loyalty out of the corner, if you will, and into the spotlight,” she said.
“It is the single most valuable repository of data and customer insight that a brand sits on,” Hicks said. Epsilon announced it was a launch partner for Databricks CustomerLake, bringing its PeopleCloud identity resolution and data enrichment into the Databricks environment.
For brands modernizing loyalty, she advised patience and accepting “a little bit of a test and learn scenario where we fail first and then succeed.” “Be really smart and know your business really well because if you understand how to drive the business, then the loyalty program can reflect that for the customer,” she said.
If AI agents end up doing more of the shopping for consumers, the loyalty programs that brands built around apps, inboxes and points balances may need rebuilding within a few years. Gartner predicts 60% of brands will use agentic AI to deliver one-to-one interactions by 2028.
Not everyone expects loyalty to survive intact. According to Emarketer, 44% of retail executives worldwide think generative AI will weaken brand loyalty by steering choice toward value and fit. Others argue loyalty programs are gaining importance because they hold consented, purchase-linked first-party data, as Emarketer’s loyalty analysis notes.
“Agentic commerce is going to disrupt everything we know and love as it exists,” said Heather Hicks, MD, growth technology, Epsilon, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Every brand app, every commerce experience, every search engine, every CRM strategy is going to look radically different.”
Points are only the plumbing
Hicks, who said she has been in loyalty marketing “for a long time,” told David Kaplan, contributor, Beet.TV, that “rewards and points and promotions are always going to be important because they’re the mechanics of the program.”
What has changed, she said, is that brands now have “so much more insight and so much more texture” about customers. “We have the opportunity to use partners and data and insights from the customers that happen well outside of our four walls that actually now informs what we’re going to be doing inside our overall strategy,” Hicks said.
“And that strategy is not just about reward mechanics, but it’s about how we engage with the customer and deliver on the right experience,” she said. She described loyalty as “the connection between all of marketing” and “the predecessor to all first-party data.”
Two sets of priorities
Asked how brands balance customer value against long-term, profitable relationships, Hicks kept it simple. “Loyalty is a value exchange. Everybody has to win in the equation,” she said.
For brands, she said, that starts with “the clarity of understanding what the business drivers are and what’s needed right now and in the future.” The goal of the moment, Hicks said, “in some cases it might be acquisition, in some cases it might be retention, in some cases it might be footfall.”
The harder part may be the customer side, where a brand’s quarterly target counts for little. Brands “have to layer that on to what the customer actually cares about in that moment, which often has nothing to do with what we care about,” she said.
From the corner to the spotlight
Hicks said loyalty measurement changes as new technologies and data arrive, and that connected identity across paid, owned and shared environments will change how loyalty marketers work. “It moves loyalty out of the corner, if you will, and into the spotlight,” she said.
“It is the single most valuable repository of data and customer insight that a brand sits on,” Hicks said. Epsilon announced it was a launch partner for Databricks CustomerLake, bringing its PeopleCloud identity resolution and data enrichment into the Databricks environment.
For brands modernizing loyalty, she advised patience and accepting “a little bit of a test and learn scenario where we fail first and then succeed.” “Be really smart and know your business really well because if you understand how to drive the business, then the loyalty program can reflect that for the customer,” she said.
