How awareness is becoming the point of sale

By the time a customer recognizes a need, you have probably already lost them.

The traditional customer journey consists of five basic steps: identification of a need, consideration of options to fill it, deciding what to buy and where to buy it, purchase, and then post-purchase evaluation.

However, that journey is becoming compressed by the emergence of a variety of new technologies and retailing strategies that turn the point of awareness into the point of sale, instantly delivering product options and a convenient purchase method to drive a transaction potentially within seconds of a customer deciding they need or want an item.

Following is an overview of how agentic commerce, influencers and celebrities, and visual search and shopping are creating a new map for customers to follow on their way to making a purchase.

Just tell me what you want

The recent announcement that Walmart is partnering with OpenAI to allow Walmart and Sam’s Club shoppers to complete purchases directly within ChatGPT generated shockwaves throughout the retail industry.  

The feature will be based on "instant checkout," a new offering from OpenAI that enables users to discover, browse, and purchase items directly from partner retailers within the ChatGPT environment.

Walmart’s ChatGPT shopping experience will use the AI model’s machine learning capabilities to learn, plan and predict customer purchases, helping shoppers anticipate their needs before they do. 

Customers will be able to chat and buy, and Walmart will handle the rest. Walmart calls this model of digital shopping, which replaces typing search terms into an engine with natural-language chatting and dynamic anticipation and suggestions of customer needs, “agentic commerce.” 

Agentic commerce is based on agentic AI, which goes a step beyond the prescriptive capabilities of generative AI by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results.

[READ MORE: How agentic AI is finding its place in retail]

One big draw of agentic AI shopping assistants is that as with generative AI, consumers can make requests and provide instructions using everyday conversational language. For example, a customer could ask a shopping bot, "Find me all the products I would need for a weeklong vacation at a beach house."

From there, the bot would automatically scour the web and come back with a wide assortment of products that might not typically be sold together, such as bathing suits, suntan lotion, folding chairs, beach towels, sunglasses, umbrellas, warm weather apparel, and light paperback fiction.

Retailers need to start creating special curated assortments specifically designed for bots carrying out natural language search requests. Think beyond individual product categories and consider all the disparate items that might fit a need or interest, potentially even using an agentic chatbot to help generate ideas. 

Catching the vibe

Influencers and celebrities continue to grow in importance as drivers of consumer preferences. Seven-in-10 respondents to a recent LTK consumer survey now make purchases based on creator recommendations, with even higher numbers among Gen Z and millennial shoppers.

Let’s face it; influencers and celebrities don’t select products because they’re cool. Products are cool because influencers and celebrities select them. Consumers want to feel the general vibe that those figures create, and using the same items is an easy way to create that sensation.

Increasingly, retailers and brands are capturing purchase at the same moment a vibe is initially created. Examples include Paramount letting viewers of the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards shop the outfits they saw in real time during the broadcast, leveraging the new Shopsense AI Lens solution to snap photos and purchase items performers were wearing.

Now you see it

Retailers of all types and verticals, from disruptive digital natives to established traditional players, are actively developing image- and even video-based search functionality, which often leads directly to their sites and apps. 

Industry players including Amazon and Google have been actively developing advanced visual search features for some time. Wayfair introduced Muse, a generative AI-based tool designed to give customers an image-based way to find inspiration and ideas for their homes, in February 2025, and Pinterest began expanding visual product search in May 2025.

But this is not simply a case of "follow the leader." Retailers are finding that letting customers search by image streamlines the search and discovery process, and also reflects the increasingly visual nature of digital content consumption, especially among younger consumers.

In addition, visual search essentially turns the world into a retail showroom. A customer can snap a photo of a product they like in any setting and instantly discover what similar items you offer, as well as in what styles, sizes, colors, etc.