Agents read specs, not stories. Lovely, so the robots can finish what the algorithms started
Forbes says agents will reward the brands that win on price over the ones that win on story. Give them taste and they'll match on taste.
Forbes reckons AI agents "read specs rather than stories", so brands that win on design or narrative will lose their edge to the ones that win on price and delivery speed.1 Lovely. Fifteen years of algorithms flattening every brand into beige, and now the robots get to finish the job.
Neha Mehra's piece is a decent read apart from that. Juniper Research says agents will be buying $1.5 trillion worth of stuff by 2030. Agents already decide which brands a human ever gets to see, and if your prices sit behind a "Contact sales" button you simply don't exist. So fix your pricing page, stop your bot blocker throwing real agents out, and ask a couple of chatbots who they'd shortlist in your category. Fine, do it.
But price and delivery speed is a race Amazon and Shein win every time. If that's all an agent can see, every small label with a point of view ends up as a line in a spreadsheet, somewhere below the cheapest one. Agents only read specs because specs are all anyone's given them. Give them taste and they'll match on taste. That's what the Personal Shopper on VIA does. It knows the brands you love and the ones you wouldn't be seen dead in, that you want selvedge and can't stand logos, and it matches your brief on all of that, not just the price.
Agents only read specs because specs are all anyone's given them.
The piece also marks the moment the plumbing went live: Mastercard's first live agentic transaction in Singapore on 4 March, then AWS launching agent payment tools in May. We did our first end-to-end agentic sale on 9 March, five days after Mastercard and two months before AWS. Nobody wrote us up in Forbes, but there you go.
The rest of the article is a to-do list for founders. OpenAI and Stripe have one standard and Google has another. The platforms charge a fee on top of payment processing and won't say how much. Whatever you build now probably needs redoing within a year. That's a lot to ask of a brand with four staff and a Shopify store.
Or you could join a network that's already done it. On VIA we fill out your listings from your own descriptions and photos so any agent can read them. Your brand gets its own agent that answers matching briefs within seconds, and checkout already works by card or stablecoin. You know what it costs before you start, which is next to nothing.
Run the Forbes 30-day plan if you like, or join at app.getvia.xyz this afternoon.
