For the last twenty years, the customer experience in digital commerce has been very rigid, with only incremental innovations. Search played an important role, but had severe limitations. We optimized for keywords, built rules, calibrated filters, and relied on Google’s ecosystem. Thankfully, that era is now ending.
A new era is emerging just as quickly: one defined not by search queries, but by agents. AI systems increasingly decide what products are relevant, how information is summarized, and which brands make it into the customer’s field of view, whether that customer is asking a question in ChatGPT or chatting with an assistant on your website.
Most retailers and brands are being pushed to incorporate AI strategies as their customers are expecting the same agentic experience on their websites as they get in AI engines.
At Cimulate, we believe the companies that win the next decade are the ones that unify these two eras, not abandon one for the other. And that belief is the foundation of our latest agentic commerce product release.
Why Agents Have Become the New Front Door to Commerce
In just two years, we’ve gone from the launch of ChatGPT to over 800 million active users. AI answer engines now sit between customers and brands in a way search never did. According to Bain & Company, 80% of searchers rely on AI summaries nearly half the time, meaning the majority of purchase journeys start and end inside an answer engine.
This has created a massive shift: visibility is no longer guaranteed. If your brand isn’t understood by an agent, it may never reach the consumer.
This is where agentic commerce comes in. Not as a buzzword, but as the operating system for the next decade of digital retail.
Uniting the Old and New Eras of Shopping
Our current product release introduces three capabilities that make the shift to agentic commerce not only possible but actionable for every digital commerce team.
1. Human Feedback: Re-Inventing Site Search with Agentic Intelligence
Traditional site search is brittle: keywords, synonyms, boosting rules, and endless exceptions. LLM-powered search changed this, but it introduced a new challenge: how do humans guide AI relevance without writing more rules?
Our new Human Feedback system is the answer. It’s a specialized RLHF (Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback) tool that lets merchandisers shape an agent’s understanding of relevance with unparalleled precision. This is the first agentic collaboration system for commerce: machine intelligence at scale, tuned by human expertise.
2. Commerce AEO: The New Battleground for Visibility
As consumers turn more to answer engines for product search and discovery, brands have lost significant website traffic, but they are gaining a new opportunity.
If you can understand how agents perceive your products, you can influence how often you appear.
Commerce AEO is the first system built for exactly this purpose. It gives brands visibility into:
- How their products show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude
- What agents get right (and wrong) about their catalog
- How to optimize for agentic visibility in the same way SEO teams once optimized for Google
This is not SEO 2.0. This is the blueprint for brand visibility in AI ecosystems. See these new updates in action at NRF 2026.
3. Co-Pilot Analytics: Making Conversational Commerce a Performance Channel
Conversational commerce has moved from novelty to necessity. Customers expect to talk to a brand the same way they’d talk to an AI agent or trusted store associate.
Our Conversational Co-Pilot already delivers that experience. But today, we’re releasing the missing piece: Co-Pilot Analytics.
For the first time, digital teams can see:
- Which conversations convert
- What customers are asking
- Where the AI assistant struggles
- How to improve performance continuously
Every conversation becomes a data signal that marketers, merchandisers, and product teams can use to optimize search and product discovery.
Agentic Commerce Isn’t a Feature. It’s the Future Retail.
This isn’t a feature that you can just bolt onto your site. It should guide the strategy behind how you attract, assist, and convert shoppers.
Agentic systems fundamentally reshape how consumers interact with brands. They change the meaning of search, the mechanics of discovery, and the expectations around support, guidance, and expertise.
What we’re building at Cimulate allows brands to operate confidently across both site search and AI answer engines.
The winners in the next era won’t be the ones who choose between them. They’ll be the ones who operate seamlessly across both.
We’re Just Getting Started
This release represents a major step toward the future we’ve envisioned since day one: a world where digital commerce is intuitive, conversational, and powered by agents that truly understand both products and people.
We’ll be showcasing all of these capabilities live at NRF 2026 in the Innovation Zone at booth #8007. If you want to see how Agentic Commerce is reshaping the industry, and how your brand can lead rather than follow, sign up for a demo.
The future of commerce will feel intuitive, intelligent, and deeply customer-aware.
We’re building that future now.