Picture this: It’s 1996. The internet is still in its infancy, and most retailers smirk at the idea of online shopping. But Tesco sees the future, becoming the first UK supermarket to launch an online shopping platform. Fast-forward to 2005, and e-commerce is no longer a novelty – it’s essential. Yet, even then, many retailers hesitated, unsure if online sales would ever match brick-and-mortar stores.
Today, history is repeating itself. This time, the shift isn’t from stores to websites but from websites to AI-powered B2A (Business-to-Agent) commerce. AI agents are already making shopping recommendations, fetching prices, and comparing products on behalf of customers. But our research shows that major UK retailers, including Tesco, are either ignoring these AI agents or banning them from accessing product data.
Here’s the problem: when retailers shut AI agents out, the agents don’t disappear—they find the data elsewhere. And when they do, the information they return is often outdated, incorrectly priced, or misrepresented. That means lost sales, frustrated shoppers, and bad buying decisions based on bad data.
So, retailers face a choice: Bury their heads in the sand and let AI agents pull unreliable data from third parties, or take control by providing an API that ensures AI agents present the right products, at the right price, in the right way – and even make your product their top recommendation.
