Last week, I spent the day at SHOWCASE 2026 in New York, Ascendant Network’s inaugural event and the first Retail + Commerce Media Upfront. And it certainly lived up to the ambition: 200+ curated buyers in the room, representing partners that collectively handle $12B in annual ad sales and sit on top of $1T in retail sales. If you work anywhere near retail or commerce media, it’s clear this is quickly evolving into a category with its own upfront season, much like TV and streaming before it.
The format felt familiar: back-to-back sessions from retail and commerce media networks showcasing their roadmaps, inventory, and value propositions. But the day opened with a keynote that asked a more fundamental question: Who is the customer?
Jeremiah Owyang of Blitzscaling Ventures opened with “When AI Agents Become the Customer,” offering a compelling perspective on how AI could reshape the shopping journey.
His proposed evolution was simple:
B2B → B2C → B2C2A2A2A… (Business-to-Consumer-to-Agent-to-Agent)
The idea: purchase decisions could increasingly be made not by a person browsing and comparing products, but by an AI agent acting on the consumer’s behalf, potentially interacting with other agents along the way. That has meaningful implications for retail media, an industry largely built around influencing human shoppers.
Today’s playbook relies on creative, product pages, sponsored placements, and promotions designed to capture attention. An AI agent, however, cares less about the ad itself and more about structured data, price, availability, product attributes, and reviews.
That raises several questions:
- How do ads evolve? While persuasive media will remain relevant for human-led discovery, machine-facing “ads” could transform into functional decision signals such as price and incentives.
- What happens to the funnel? The path from discovery to purchase could become increasingly automated, shifting the goal from simply driving a click to ensuring your product is the one an agent recommends.
- How much will retailers know about the consumer? As agents transact on behalf of shoppers, traditional signals of identity and intent could become harder to capture.
None of this suggests the current retail media model is going away. First-party purchase data and proximity to transactions remain incredibly valuable. But it does suggest that the definition of the “shopper” may be evolving.
Beyond the AI conversation, SHOWCASE was a strong signal that retail and commerce media have officially entered their upfront era. The scale, investment, expanding inventory, and sophistication of the networks in the room made clear that this is becoming a core part of the broader media ecosystem.
The more interesting question is what comes next.
Retail media is evolving not only in where brands can reach consumers, but potentially in how purchase decisions are made. As networks build their future roadmaps, marketers will need to consider how their brands show up in an increasingly automated path to purchase.
B2C2A2A may be a clunky acronym, but the shift it could represent is one worth watching.
