What happens when AI starts deciding what goes in your shopping basket?

Azoma CEO and co-founder Max Sinclair joins us in person for episode 15 of The Agent Economy, sharing news of investment from dunnhumby ventures and what it could mean for connecting AI recommendations to real-world sales.

We explore how shopping assistants like Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky, ChatGPT and Gemini are changing product discovery, why AI visibility metrics can be misleading, and how brands can respond using the five Cs of agentic commerce: completeness, context, citations, correctness and customer acquisition.

Plus, Max shares how Azoma builds in two-week cycles, how his team uses AI day to day, and why the future of shopping might arrive sooner than we think.

Find out more about Azoma.

In this episode, Max is joined by Aisha Khan, Head of Dentsu Commerce for North America and the first agency partner to appear on the podcast. Aisha brings deep enterprise commerce experience from WPP, Publicis, and PMG, where she led commerce strategy and retail media for brands including Unilever, Lego, Mars, and Nestlé.

They unpack one of the wildest news weeks in agentic commerce yet: the launch of Meta Muse, Instacart's new shopping agent Clementine, and the landmark Amazon Ads x OpenAI partnership that puts Amazon DSP ads inside ChatGPT.

From there, the conversation turns to the big question: do brands still need agencies when AI agents can execute campaigns? Aisha makes the case for agencies evolving from a labor layer into an intelligence and orchestration layer, and explains why efficiency gains from AI are actually creating more complexity, not less.

Also in this episode:

• Why the battle among the big platforms is really about owning your personal "super assistant"
• The anthropological side of shopping, and why brands must now market to humans and machines at the same time
• How the digital shelf is shrinking from ten results to three or four, and soon to one
• Why "share of voice" metrics break down when every LLM recommendation is hyper-personalised
• The biggest shift CMOs aren't preparing for: treating LLM optimisation as a generalist bucket instead of a matrixed discipline
• Why Dentsu has partnered with ⁠⁠Azoma⁠⁠ as its AEO/GEO and agentic commerce provider.
• What will separate winners from losers a year from now: trust, risk appetite, and first mover advantage

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The episode closes with why Dentsu chose Azoma as its partner for GEO, with Aisha calling it a best-in-class capability not just for retail but beyond, and what the two teams plan to build together for Dentsu's clients.

Levi Levenfiche is co-founder of PerfectTed, the fastest–growing energy drink brand in the UK and the largest matcha brand in Europe. The company started on his Kitchen table with his wife and brother. PerfectTed is one of Dragons' Den's biggest stories (the UK's version of Shark Tank). Their energetic pitch (⁠youtube video⁠) which they opened by stating their "mission to spread positive energy", ended with all five Dragos offering to invest, from who they chose a £50k investment from Stephen Bartlett. He has since followed this up with a second of investment of £1m. PerfectTed have fully capitalized on their 15 minutes of TV fame, growing monthly sales from £7k pre-Dragons Den to +£1m a month today in just two and a half years.

Levi joins Max to discuss their strategies of focusing on brand and community, following Stephen Bartlett's advice of "building a cult", and how they became a repeat purchase that is part of their customer's daily rituals. Levi and Max also discuss' PerfectTed's three-pronged sales channel approach of Retail, ecommerce, and Highstreet coffee shop franchise partnerships. Perfect Ted is now stocked in all major retailers, including Tesco, Asda, and Sainsburys; selling on Amazon and Shopify; as well as partnering with major Highstreet chains such as Joe and the Juice and Blacksheep. Finally, Levi turns the tables and ask's Max's advice on how he would optimize PerfectTed on Amazon, particularly for Amazon's new search Algorithm COSMO.

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in 2024.