Rethinking CX Strategy in an AI-First World

At Opticon 2025, one theme echoed across every stage and hallway conversation: AI agents are rapidly becoming the new front door to discovery and purchase.

This shift doesn’t just tweak customer experience (CX) strategy — it reshapes it entirely. For CX leaders, the challenge is designing for a world where customers may never “visit” you in the traditional sense, yet still expect your brand to deliver clarity, trust, and seamless action.

AI Agents: The Ruthless New Gatekeepers

AI agents don’t behave like humans. They don’t browse, wander, or weigh dozens of options. Instead, they scan structured data, surface one to three best matches, and execute the task.

That makes them ruthless filters. Studies show up to 80% of consumer AI queries end without a click. If your product information isn’t clear, complete, and structured, your brand risks being invisible at the moment of choice.

Meanwhile, human traffic is still present, but it’s trending down. And the visits that do occur often carry high intent. The new balancing act? Designing for two audiences at once: AI agents and humans.

Four Rethinks for CX Leaders

To stay visible and relevant in this new environment, CX leaders need to revisit some long-standing assumptions. These four areas deserve immediate attention:

1. Discoverability in the Age of LLMs
   Traditional SEO tactics don’t translate to agent-driven search. What matters are structured, intent-rich attributes and metadata that reflect real customer needs.
2. Influence the Agent
   Clarity and completeness win. Rich product data — covering attributes such as material, compatibility, and seasonality — determines visibility. Sparse or inconsistent data rarely gets picked up.
3. Checkout Is Splintering
   More transactions will take place inside agent-mediated environments, where brands may receive little or no upstream data. Supporting agent-native checkout or direct-to-checkout deep links will be essential.
4. The Website’s New Role
   Your site still matters, but less as a discovery hub and more as a conversion engine. Product detail pages and checkout flows must be fast, friction-free, and accessible to both people and bots.

What This Means for Content and CMS

Content now serves two equally critical functions:

• Feed the agents. Structured information — attributes, availability, pricing, ratings, and use cases — drives visibility in AI-driven answers.
• Reassure the humans. Images, videos, how-tos, FAQs, and reviews build confidence once people engage.

Your CMS becomes the bridge between machines and people: making your brand legible to algorithms while persuasive to customers.

Immediate Actions to Take

Translating these shifts into practice starts with tightening the basics. Before you experiment with new channels or complex orchestration, focus on the core steps that make your brand visible to agents and reassuring to people alike:

• Clean up your APIs. Ensure product, pricing, inventory, and policy data are agent-readable.
• Audit your attributes. Confirm they’re complete, intent-driven, and reflective of real-world use cases.
• Enable agent-native checkout. Support direct or deep-link pathways to purchase.
• Optimize PDPs. Keep them simple, fast, and bot-accessible. Remove blockers that may shut out legitimate agent traffic.
• Publish helpful content. How-tos, service guides, care instructions, and FAQs remain critical for human decision-making.

The Tech Foundation

Meeting the dual mandate of serving agents and humans requires a composable, API-first stack.

Platforms like Optimizely paired with commercetools are proving effective. With GA available since May, 60+ joint customers, and implementations going live in 8–12 weeks, the infrastructure for agent-first CX is already in motion.

Preparing for AI agents doesn’t mean sidelining human experience. It means rethinking CX to succeed with both.

At Nansen, we see this as the next great evolution of customer experience. The brands investing now — structuring their data for agents while designing experiences that build human trust — will be the ones customers consistently see, choose, and return to in an AI-first world.

Ready to Rethink Your CX Strategy?

If you’re evaluating how to adapt your digital experience for an AI-first world, now is the time to act. Start with our guide, Designing for Humans in an AI World, which explores how to balance machine legibility with human connection.