Agentic Commerce Moves From Discovery to Checkout with Jennifer Howard of Forter
Jennifer Howard is the Chief Merchant at Forter. She spent more than twenty years on the merchant operator side at Gap, Levi’s, ELF Cosmetics and Balsam Brands, and she joined Forter this year to bring that merchant perspective in-house. We talked with her on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, where the talk of the show was how fast agentic commerce had moved in a matter of weeks.
Two Weeks That Moved Agents to Checkout
A month before the show, agents coming to a merchant’s site still felt like the future to Jennifer. Then Muse reached two and a half million downloads in two weeks and put the customer in the driver’s seat.
“So whereas before they were talking about search and discovery, do we have the right data? Is our content ready? Can the agent scrape our site? We’re now fast-forwarding to commerce because people will expect that their assistants can check out for them,” she says.
Forter sits at the center of identity for customers that run from Priceline to Wayfair to Chick-fil-A, so it sees how people shop whether a shopper is new or an assistant is new. Jennifer also pointed out that Forter is agnostic to the protocol an assistant uses.
Humans Still Make Up Most of the Traffic
We asked how a brand stays visible to people and to agents at the same time. Jennifer said agentic traffic is still a small piece of what reaches a site.
“Human beings are still engaging with you as a merchant and with you as a brand. So creating that loyalty, creating those connections with people is still very, very important,” she says.
Assistants will draw on a shopper’s buying behavior, so the brands that connect with customers end up inside that behavior when an assistant chooses where to buy.
We Have Asked These Questions Before
On whether shoppers will hand an assistant that much control, Jennifer has met people on both sides, from “please make my life easier” to people who will not share a calendar or buying preferences. She has heard the doubts before.
“The first question we asked ourselves are, will people buy clothes online, right? You need to touch and feel, people are gonna want to understand the weight. That’s not a question that we are asking today,” she says.
Saving a credit card on a website and buying on a small screen went the same way, and she expects agent adoption to move faster than any of them.
Speed Over Authenticity
Her definition of AI slop is “speed over accuracy or speed over authenticity.” Brands still need to put out content, because if they do not, someone else owns the story, whether a competitor or a fraudster. Jennifer wants that content made with authenticity, because she believes customers can see through it.
Her hot take came from a Forter survey that asked shoppers whether they will use agents to buy holiday gifts. The numbers were not out yet, and the question she cares about is whether people will admit it.
“Hey hubby, I picked this just for you. Chat help me out,” she says.
Find Forter at forter.com.