As product catalogs grow, content multiplies, and shopping journeys splinter across platforms, AI recommendation engines are becoming the connective tissue between desire and decision. In 2026, retail leaders expect the technology to move from responding to queries to proactively anticipating what consumers want and guiding them through increasingly complex choice environments.

Across platforms, agencies, and retail innovators, leaders point to three accelerating trends: The rise of multimodal visual discovery, the emergence of AI agents as decision intermediaries, and a new era of hyper-personalized, AI-generated media.

Yet they also note a consistent gap: AI’s ability to interpret human meaning and emotion remains limited, elevating the importance of brand-led storytelling and trust.

Visual discovery matures

Visual search has become a driver of both inspiration and conversion. Platforms that sit at the intersection of taste, visual culture, and commercial intent are now rebuilding their infrastructure around multimodal models.

“Our proprietary multimodal visual search model now outperforms leading off-the-shelf models by over 30 percentage points on the relevance of shopping recommendations," said Julie Towns, vice president of product marketing and product operations at Pinterest. She pointed to the momentum behind Pinterest’s behavioral understanding, explaining that the platform’s “‘taste graph’…has grown more than 70% in the last two years.”

These capabilities are not just technical milestones, they signal a shift in the architecture of discovery. With stronger visual embeddings and richer taste signals, platforms can link inspiration directly to action.

Towns describes the company’s plan to “make Pinterest the best place to start visually driven commercial journeys” and connect that directly into its ad and assistant ecosystem.

For retailers and brands, the key adaptation is ensuring product content, including images, attributes, and context, is optimized for multimodal interpretation. In a world where discovery begins with a swipe on a visual idea rather than a typed query, assets become the new interface with algorithms.

AI agents are the new gatekeepers

The next leap in shopping behavior comes from tools that don’t just answer questions, but perform cognitive labor on behalf of consumers. This shift changes not only how decisions are made, but who (or what) brands must influence to stay visible.

"Agents will increasingly handle the cognitive drudgery of comparing products, reviews, prices, and specs," said Griffin Smith, director and head of behavioral science at Ogilvy. "Brands will be competing not just for human attention but for a place inside the agent’s recommendation logic. That means shaping how consumers use and configure their agents and optimizing content so it’s part of that search."

Meanwhile, discovery behaviors are migrating toward AI-mediated environments, particularly within sought-after demographics.

“We are seeing a major shift toward purchase discovery happening on social and AI-driven

platforms," said Rachel Brandt, CEO at Corner Table Creative. "Younger consumers increasingly start their research on TikTok, Instagram, and/or with AI recommendations. In 2026, brands will need clear product stories, strong social proof, and presence where AI systems pull their recommendations from.”

It’s a reframing of search optimization for an agentic era. Brands must ask:

• What inputs are AI agents drawing from?
• How are product attributes structured?
• How do digital assets translate into machine-readable signals of quality, fit, and relevance?

But there is a remaining blind spot in identity. While agents excel at parsing specs and prices, "an agent can optimize for features and price, but it can’t (yet) get at who we truly are or what moves us,” said Smith.

The need for trust and creativity

The next frontier is not just AI recommending content, but AI creating it. Generative video platforms are poised to become the new discovery surfaces, embedding product cues inside personalized narratives.

"Agentic AI is set to reshape shopping through AI-powered content feeds that blur the line

between entertainment and commerce…think TikTok, but entirely AI-created," said Maor Sadra, CEO and co-founder of INCRMNTAL. "As these AI mega-publishers scale, they’ll become powerful discovery engines. Product recommendations will no longer feel like ads, they’ll be seamlessly embedded in personalised narratives, replays of your photo album, or stylised recreations of your WhatsApp chats."

This automated blurring of content and commerce will enable hyper-personalized avenues towards discovery.

"Consumers won’t search for products; products will find them, delivered by AI agents that know their taste, context, and timing better than any human salesperson ever could," said Sadra.

Even as AI accelerates utility, human creativity becomes more, not less, important according to retail leaders.

"Agentic AI will accelerate discovery and personalization, helping consumers quickly find what matters to them amid vast choice," said Shae Hong, CEO and co-founder of Made by Gather.

"What will lag is the translation of that intelligence into emotionally resonant, brand-led experiences. Human creativity and design still set the experiences that people remember."

Consumers may increasingly rely on AI to navigate choice, but the brands that win will be those that combine machine-readable clarity with human-centered storytelling.

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