You can’t wait until AI agents control 30% of grocery baskets to redesign your loyalty strategy.

AI agents are beginning to change how shoppers discover, compare and buy groceries. As more routine purchasing decisions are delegated to AI, retailers will increasingly need to win not only with the shopper, but with the agent acting on their behalf.

And that changes the rules of loyalty.

Traditional loyalty mechanics built around points, coupons and promotions were designed to influence people. But what happens when a machine is making, or influencing, the decision?

In our new e-book, Loyalty 3.0 in the Age of Agentic Commerce, we explore what the rise of agentic shopping means for grocery retailers, why emotional loyalty becomes even more important, and what retailers should be doing now to prepare.

Retailers will need to win twice

In an agentic world, retailers face two distinct challenges.

First, they need to become agent-ready, ensuring their loyalty economics, pricing, product data and rewards can be understood and acted upon by AI.

But being machine-readable won’t be enough. Retailers must also remain humanly preferred.

Because when an AI agent can optimise for price, convenience and promotions, retailers need to give shoppers a reason to instruct their agent:

“Choose this retailer.”

We believe this makes emotional loyalty the fourth dimension and multiplier of agentic grocery decision-making, alongside financial, lifestyle and mission goals.

What should retailers do now?

We’ve developed an 18-month playbook built around two parallel priorities:

• Become agent-ready: Make loyalty value computable, improve product and pricing data, develop the right infrastructure and establish clear guardrails.

• Build emotional defensibility: Create cultural, aspirational and community connections that give shoppers genuine reasons to prefer your retail ecosystem.

The e-book explores emerging examples of agentic commerce, combines them with our own loyalty research and introduces a five-stage model showing how shopper trust could evolve from AI-assisted discovery through to increasingly autonomous purchasing.

We also look at how loyalty measurement needs to evolve, introducing measures such as share of baskets AI-assisted and loyalty prompt preference rate.

When AI chooses the basket, will it choose you?

Agentic commerce may still be emerging, but waiting for widespread adoption before responding could leave retailers redesigning their loyalty strategy under pressure.

The time to prepare is now.

Download Loyalty 3.0 in the Age of Agentic Commerce to explore what agentic shopping means for grocery loyalty and the steps retailers can take over the next 18 months to stay chosen.