Buying moments are surfacing everywhere; in search results, social media, streaming platforms, and the AI tools guiding consumer choices. For retailers, that means rethinking how conversion happens and reshaping commerce operations for a world where any touchpoint can become a point of sale.

When discovery becomes decision

“AI discoverability is now the number one thing on the mind of all CMOs,” said Eric Franchi, general partner at Pacvue during a recent Pacvue webinar.

Right now, AI is acting more like an accelerator, compressing the shopping journey by surfacing options faster, narrowing down choices, and cutting out steps between intent and action.

“It is really about AI assisting you and getting you to that conversion faster than it is about completely taking over the wheel,” said Andrew Lipsman, founding advisor and strategist at Colosseum Strategy.

But Franchi believes the industry could be heading toward “absolute purchase collapse,” where consumers increasingly rely on agents and LLMs not just to discover and recommend products, but to make purchase decisions on their behalf.

In some ways, we’re already seeing early versions of this through social commerce. But like AI search, social commerce is very much a work in progress.

“Conversion from discovery to purchase is literally happening in seconds, especially if you're within the TikTok ecosystem,” said Sunava Dutta, chief product officer at Pacvue. “I don't think there is mastery yet of this space… just because it's still very early and there's a lot of development happening.”

Even traditional brand channels like TV are being reengineered for commerce.

Lipsman described performance TV as “the third wave of TV,” with linear TV delivering broad reach, CTV introducing granular targeting, and performance TV closing the loop on sales impact.

That evolution is attracting a new class of advertisers to the medium, said Franchi, brands that previously viewed TV as too blunt or too difficult to measure are now reconsidering it as a measurable commerce channel.

Rewiring commerce from the inside out

The funnel may be collapsing externally, but internally, many organizations are still built for a linear world.

“We have to rethink the foundation,” Dutta said. “We have to think of signals, inventory, media, pricing, these things cannot live in silos. They actually have to physically live together in the same cluster.”

AI is emerging as a critical layer in that transformation, giving retailers the ability to speed up and automate commerce operations.

“I would advise marketers to think about all of the ways that AI can begin to accelerate and augment the way they do things,” said Franchi. “It can automate content creation, media buying and planning, audience identification, measurement.”

The goal is to rebuild commerce platforms to be “semi-autonomous, measurable decision systems,” said Dutta.

“We don't see a system where there is no hands on keyboard, no human ever intervening,” he said.

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