• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, December 22, 2025

There is a lot of confusion about what ecommerce agents do, and the gap continues to widen between what is possible and practical for consumers and merchants.

Scott Hendrickson, CRO of the venture capital funded startup firmly.ai, a Perplexity and Mastercard agentic partner, helped to separate myth from reality during a discussion with Data & Programmatic Insider.

Hendrickson said the key is understanding the brand’s customers and managing their lifetime value.

“Where you can buy products will become fragmented,” he said. “Different consumer journeys will happen, some with small and some large. If you break it down within media, brand and attention matters. Those key metrics will not go away.”

If an AI agentic agent operates independently and a consumer is unhappy with the experience and product, the brand will take the blame for that unhappiness.

“Merchants need to remain the merchant of record,” he said. In an agentic transaction, “platforms must not become the merchant of record.”

TikTok Shop, for example, doesn’t share any data with the merchant, Hendrickson said.

All customer data must remain with the merchant, so marketers and media buyers can understand what is being sold through agentic channels. There should be no difference in the available data from the consumer between an order placed on the merchant’s website and a third-party platform such as a publisher or search engine.

The information from firmly.ai is based on data flow as a result of a retailer’s data being directly connected with publisher’s. That connection enables the designation for the retailer's Merchant of Record. In the case of publishers and affiliates, it enables better understanding, without use of an attribution model, of exactly what consumers are purchasing.

“Agents are extensions of us,” Hendrickson said. “But the core still comes from humans. Building brands and identity will become more important.”

Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites jumped 805% year-over-year (YoY) on Black Friday. Salesforce — based on 1.5 billion shoppers tracked — reported $14.2 billion in AI-influenced online sales in on that day, and Sensor Tower found Amazon purchases via Rufus for sessions rose 100% vs. the prior 30 days.

When asked how consumers overall feel about storing credit card numbers online, so agentic systems can pull from it and make a purchase, Hendrickson said firmly.ai is working closely with PayPal, Klarna and Apple Pay, and others are working to help make these transactions secure. 

“Enabling a consumer to transact across applications and publishers has become the opportunity,” he said. “It’s not just the large language models. That has been a dream, not a reality, for the past 10 years. Now we’re in a position for the ecosystem to take advantage of it."