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.

Welcome to the first episode of Agentic Commerce Architects. Max Sinclair sits down with Emma Lifer, Marketplace SEO and Merchandising Manager at Grüns, one of the fastest growing supplement brands on Amazon, to unpack how a real practitioner is winning visibility across Alexa for Shopping, Walmart Sparky, ChatGPT, Gemini and beyond.

Emma leads SEO, AEO, affiliates and marketplace sales at Gruns, and previously spent three years leading SEO at Front Row Group. In this conversation she shares exactly how she manages agentic commerce day to day, including why she treats AI shopping as another aisle, how she balances writing for humans and agents, and why she makes content changes weekly without fear of tanking her rankings.

In this episode:

• Why the old wives' tale that changing your Amazon content destroys your rank is dead
• How AI agents treat the Buy Box, stock status and pricing differently to human shoppers
• Whether agentic checkout will quietly erode Subscribe and Save economics
• Compliance risk for supplement brands when Alexa hallucinates health claims, and how to correct it through backend attributes, reviews and Q&As
• Counterfeits and copycats in an agentic world
• How Emma drives cross-functional alignment across PR, PPC, legal and brand without a formal task force
• The three practical first steps any brand can take on agentic commerce optimisation, starting with backend attributes
• Do AI agents help challenger brands differentiate, or flatten everything into cheapest and best rated?

Whether you manage five SKUs or five thousand, this is a tactical, in-the-weeds look at what actually works right now.

Hosted by Max Sinclair, Co-founder and CEO of Azoma, the Agentic Commerce Optimisation platform. Learn more at azoma.ai.

Agentic commerce is moving from buzzword to boardroom priority - but what should brands actually do next? In this episode of Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant is joined by Lauren Liv Gilbert of the Digital Shelf Institute and Max, founder and CEO of Azoma, to translate a fast-changing landscape into a clear, practical strategy for brand and ecommerce leaders.

Together, they unpack the 5 Cs of Agentic Commerce: Completeness, Context, Citations, Correctness, and Customer Acquisition. (Download the full whitepaper).The conversation explores how structured product data makes products eligible for AI recommendations, why listings must answer real shopper questions, where platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon’s shopping assistant, and Walmart’s Sparky source their information, and how brands can identify and correct inaccurate AI-generated claims. The framework is designed as a compounding flywheel, connecting digital-shelf fundamentals with measurable commercial growth.

From building contextual product content and earning trusted citations to navigating Reddit, brand.com, earned media, AI personalisation, and emerging measurement challenges, this episode offers an actionable roadmap for competing on the agentic shelf.

AI isn’t coming for commerce—it’s already deciding what gets discovered, recommended, and purchased.

In this special episode created in partnership with WIAB—Women in Amazon Business, Cristina and Jacqui sit down with Max Sinclair, founder and CEO of Azoma, to unpack the AI visibility revolution and what it means for brands, retailers, founders, and women shaping the future of commerce.

Max spent six years at Amazon, including helping establish its search operations in Singapore. Now, he’s helping brands understand a very different kind of discovery landscape—one where shoppers may no longer scroll through pages of products because AI assistants are narrowing the options for them.

Think fewer search results. More personalized recommendations. And eventually? An AI agent choosing the product before the shopper ever sees the alternatives.

Convenient? Absolutely.

A little terrifying for brands still relying on yesterday’s SEO playbook? Also yes.

Max introduces Azoma’s Five C’s of agentic commerce optimization—completeness, context, citations, correctness, and customer acquisition—and explains why brands need to start thinking beyond keywords and product-page rankings.

The conversation also gets into the “SHe” in SHeCOMMERCE: why women cannot afford to sit politely on the sidelines while AI systems are being built, trained, and deployed.

Women influence enormous portions of household and consumer spending. They understand the customers, categories, and real-life decisions these systems will shape. Their voices, experiences, and leadership need to be embedded in the technology—not added as an afterthought.

Inside the episode:

• Why traditional search strategies are no longer enough
• How AI shopping agents are changing product discovery
• What brands need to know about AI visibility and accuracy
• Why curiosity—not technical expertise—is the first step into AI
• Max’s framework for finding your founder edge and spotting the next inflection point
• Why more women need to test, challenge, build, and lead in this space

The message? You don’t need to become an AI engineer overnight.

But you do need to lean in.

Because when algorithms influence what the world buys, representation isn’t a nice-to-have—it shapes who gets discovered, which products get recommended, and whose needs become the default.

🎧 Press play and join the AI visibility revolution.

Bold Brands. Fierce Women. One Sisterhood.
And a few very evolved men helping us build it.

SHeCOMMERCE:

Website: https://shecommercepodcast.com/
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shecommercepodcast/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@SHeCOMMERCEPodcast

In this episode, Max Sinclair, founder of Azoma and ex-Amazonian, breaks down how AI shopping agents—like ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and Walmart’s Sparky—are completely rewriting the rules of how consumers discover and buy products online. From monumental algorithmic shifts to the collapse of traditional keyword SEO, discover why optimizing for Agentic Commerce is the mandatory new frontier for brands and retailers.

• The Agentic Discovery Shift: Why we are currently at an early-2000s inflection point resembling Google’s massive takeover of Yahoo search.

• The Shrinking Digital Shelf: Moving away from Page 1 on Amazon to surviving a world where AI agents only recommend the top 5 highly personalized products.

• Keywords vs. LLM World Knowledge: Why Amazon's Cosmo algorithm underlines a permanent shift away from traditional keyword stack-ranking.

• The Science of Query Fanout: Breaking down why the average AI commerce query performs 10 internal subqueries and cites 15 different sources before answering.

• The Big Tech Breakdown: Analyzing the direct bottom-line impact of Amazon’s Rufus, Alexa for Shopping, Google Gemini Spark, and Universal Cart.

• Walmart’s Sparky & Meta’s Ecosystem: What happens when a retail app becomes fully "AI-native" and average order sizes instantly jump by 35%.

• The Netscape Trap: The existential hurdle facing ChatGPT and why custom retailer apps (like Target and Sephora) are stepping in.

• Action Plan: Max introduces Azoma's groundbreaking 5C Framework for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

• The Black Friday Boom: AI chatbots and agents drove $14 Billion in sales on Black Friday alone, influencing 20% of total purchases.

• The Rufus Effect: Rufus drove $12 Billion in incremental revenue for Amazon, making users who interact with it up to 60% more likely to purchase.

• The Sparky Surge: Walmart shoppers using Sparky place orders that are, on average, 35% larger, with weekly active users doubling quarter-over-quarter.

To stay visible in the age of conversational search, your brand needs a completely new playbook. Max introduces Azoma's 5C Framework—the ultimate guide to mastering agentic commerce optimization and protecting your AI share of voice.

👉 [Download Azoma's Official 5C Framework White Paper Here ]

• Website: https://www.azoma.ai/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-sinclair-ai/

• Subscribe to the Podcast: Hit follow on Spotify to never miss an episode on the fast-moving AI retail landscape!

Keywords: Agentic Commerce, Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky, Google Gemini, Max Sinclair, Azoma, AI Ecommerce Strategy, Answer Engine Optimization

In this episode of The New Frontier, Jo and Max are joined by Artiom Enkov , VP of Insights at Gener8 to unpack one of the first detailed UK and US data studies on Amazon Rufus usage. Drawing on a fully consented metered panel of more than 50,000 Android users, Generate reveals a surprising demographic twist: Rufus is indexing highest among older shoppers, especially Baby Boomers, Gen X, and retired users, rather than the AI-native younger generations many would expect.

The conversation dives into how shoppers are actually using Rufus inside Amazon. In the US, where Rufus has more advanced functionality and account memory, users lean heavily on comparison, product evaluation, post-purchase questions, and more complex prompts. In the UK, where Rufus is still more limited, usage is more focused on quick factual answers about products. The team explores why Rufus appears to be less about top-of-funnel discovery and more about helping shoppers navigate the “messy middle” of purchase decisions.

The episode also looks ahead to the future of AI-powered commerce, including sponsored Rufus prompts, advertising inside AI shopping journeys, trust in AI recommendations, and Amazon’s move toward scheduled actions and agentic purchasing. From comparison tables to automated replenishment, the discussion highlights how Rufus could reshape not only search and advertising on Amazon, but the way brands think about optimization in an AI-first shopping environment.

This podcast is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Azoma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazing Wave⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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