Add to cart, courtesy AI

For nearly a century, the Indian shopper was won through noise. The biggest hoarding on Linking Road, the catchiest radio jingle, the celebrity endorsement during a cricket match, or the sponsored listing at the top of a shopping app all influenced what eventually landed in our shopping carts. Advertising was never just a business function. It shaped what we noticed, what we trusted and, ultimately, what we bought. That familiar world is now beginning to change, and artificial intelligence is quietly leading the shift.

The clearest glimpse of this future came recently from Glance, an Indian AI platform that has made shopping undergo transformation since the rise of e-commerce. Unlike an online marketplace, Glance does not sell products. Instead, it learns what a user likes, understands their preferences, studies their previous purchases and recommends products that best fit their needs.

Just as online shopping replaced many visits to physical stores, AI assistants may now replace much of the searching, comparing and decision-making that consumers currently do themselves. Instead of opening multiple tabs, comparing prices and reading endless reviews, shoppers could simply ask an AI assistant to find the best option. The AI discovers products, compares alternatives and identifies the best value. These are precisely the functions that advertising has traditionally influenced. As AI performs them itself, the importance of advertising in shaping purchase decisions naturally begins to decline.

The consequences for brands are profound. Companies have always spent heavily to remain in consumers’ minds because familiarity often translates into sales. But an AI assistant does not remember brands the way people do. It has no emotional attachment to a familiar logo or a celebrity endorsement. It can compare thousands of products within seconds and recommend whichever best matches the customer’s needs. That means a relatively unknown Indian manufacturer could suddenly compete with a global brand if its product offers genuinely better quality or value. In this new environment, success will depend less on creating memorable campaigns and more on building products that deserve to be recommended.

This is not a distant trend unfolding somewhere in Silicon Valley. If anything, India appears unusually well prepared for it. A widely cited Capgemini study found that 41 per cent of Indian consumers already use AI-driven shopping tools, while another 40 percent plan to start soon. That means more than eight out of every ten Indian shoppers are either already using AI or are ready to let AI influence their buying decisions. No other country in the survey reported a higher figure. In this story, India is not simply adopting a global trend. It is helping shape it.

That advantage is not limited to consumer behaviour. India also has an institutional head start. Long before agentic shopping became a global conversation, the country had already built the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a Government backed protocol designed to do for online retail what UPI did for digital payments. Instead of forcing sellers to compete for visibility within a handful of dominant platforms through expensive advertising, ONDC allows any buyer application to discover any seller connected to the network.

By 2026, ONDC had expanded to several hundred thousand sellers, more than a hundred buyer applications and operations across hundreds of towns and cities. A kirana shop in a tier-three town can now be discovered by a customer sitting in Pune without paying hefty advertising fees simply to become visible. India reached this point through digital public infrastructure long before AI shopping became mainstream. As agentic shopping grows, that early investment could become one of India’s biggest competitive advantages.

For India’s millions of small and medium enterprises, this convergence between AI and ONDC could be transformative. Many have spent years arguing that rising digital advertising costs make it difficult to compete with larger companies. If AI recommends products chiefly on the basis of quality, value and customer satisfaction, smaller businesses could finally compete on more equal terms. A well-made kurta from a local manufacturer or a competitively priced insurance policy from a lesser-known company could stand alongside products from much larger brands without first having to win an expensive advertising battle.

Advertising, though, is not disappearing, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Every interaction with an AI system requires substantial computing power, known as inference cost, and someone ultimately has to pay for it. Advertising has long funded free digital services, and AI will be no exception. The real change lies in what advertising looks like. Instead of focusing only on attracting human attention, brands will increasingly have to ensure that AI systems understand their products accurately through reliable information about quality, pricing, delivery performance and customer satisfaction. Some technology experts have begun describing this as agent-to-agent optimisation, where a brand’s AI effectively communicates with the consumer’s AI assistant. In that world, structured and trustworthy product information becomes just as valuable as a memorable tagline once was.

The implications extend beyond individual brands. If AI assistants can discover, compare and recommend products independently, even online marketplaces could lose some of the influence they currently enjoy. Much of their power today comes from helping consumers search through millions of products. When an intelligent assistant can perform that task instantly on behalf of the shopper, the marketplace becomes less central to the buying journey. That represents a meaningful shift for India’s digital commerce ecosystem, where a handful of platforms have long shaped product discovery and the advertising economy built around it.

There is, all the same, one reason to remain cautious. The companies building AI shopping assistants are businesses too, and businesses need revenue. Today’s neutral recommendation engine could become tomorrow’s sponsored recommendation if commercial incentives begin influencing what AI suggests to consumers. The technology promises a more level playing field, but that promise will only hold if transparency and fairness remain central to how these systems operate.

That is why policy matters just as much as technology. As AI agents begin influencing more purchase decisions, concerns around data privacy, algorithmic transparency and fair recommendation practices will become increasingly important. Consumers deserve to know why one product is being recommended over another, while businesses deserve confidence that recommendations are based on merit rather than hidden commercial arrangements. India has already demonstrated through UPI and ONDC that open, well-regulated digital infrastructure can create more competitive markets while benefiting ordinary citizens. The same principles should guide AI powered shopping so that trust remains at the heart of this new ecosystem.

The billboard is not disappearing tomorrow, and festive campaigns will continue to brighten our cities every Diwali. But the real contest is quietly shifting. For decades, brands competed for the attention of people. Soon, they may compete for the recommendation of machines. If that future unfolds as many expect, the loudest advertisement may no longer decide what we buy. The best product just might.

The writer is Assistant Professor, IIM Bodh Gaya; Views presented are personal.