Many consumers will have their own personal shopping agents: Criteo

Criteo is a global technology company that helps marketers and media owners reach their goals through the world’s leading commerce media platform

Taranjeet Singh, MD, Venture Markets, APAC, said India has been at the heart of innovation. We connect the consumer at every stage of their journey. 

Todds Parsons, Chief Product Officer and President of Performance Media, said India is a very vibrant market. Agentic AI is growing. The expectation is for over $1 trillion by 2030. ChatGPT started two years ago. Today, 10% of the global population is on ChatGPT. 

GenAI use has been growing at an unprecedented pace. India today leads the ChatGPT usage, and has surpassed USA. It currently has 13.5% of active users. India also ranks third in DeepSeek mobile app. 

Consumers are integrating AI into their shopping journeys. 85% use AI tools for shopping purposes. 87% use more than one AI tool for shopping. 71% use AI tools weekly for shopping purposes. People are using one to two AI tools for their daily lives. They are mainly using AI to buy apparel, electronics, etc. 

What's next in agentic commerce? An AI agent acts on behalf of a consumer to compare,  and buy products and services, based on their preferences, goals, and consent. Subroutines are connected personal agents are still not well developed. Memory is becoming increasing larger investment for AI models. It definitely takes a village to make a systemic change happen.

Tomorrow, many consumers will have their own personal shopping agents. They draw on an extensive range of data [memory}, finds an optimal solution, connects to task-specific agents, and then takes actions, as authorized.  We are starting to support the entire flow. 

Agentic commerce has many steps before it can win consumers. An AI agent is only as smart as the data it learns from. It accesses relevant, high-information data. It then enables the right connections, to APIs, database queries, and vector searches. It filters out hallucinations, and false information. All of these lead to agentic commerce.

Data policy and policy enforcement are also important. We are now investing a lot in the second stage right now. We are also very good at filtering out hallucinations. 

AI is now playing a growing role in commerce. AI adoption is at the highest in the early stagess of the consumer journey. 94% are using for discovery, 85% for comparing options and 67% for reading reviews. 69% find the best deal, and 67% make the final decision. 32% use it for post purchase or retain.

There are deepening direct data relationships for reliable and durable AI-driven commerce. Criteo has retailer direct partnerships, publisher direct partnerships, and LLM direct partnerships. You need to do different labelling for different products. Publishers have an opportunity to present content that is appealing to an agent. For LLM's we are beginning to work with every major provider. 

Some LLM models are taking all of this a bit slow. OpenAI, and Google are part of that. W e are now bringing AI to life in Criteo's solutions. We are doing discovery advertising, creative generation, and commerce GO! We are currently doing 30s videos, and sometimes, a bit longer.

There are three use cases for the agentic future. These are prompt-based product recommendations, smarter, real-time audience activation, and agent-enabled full-funnel campaigns. Our MCP server powers the clients' sites. Eg. Nordstorm has a shopping assistant. 

AI presents a new, rich channel to capitalize on immediately. Optimization is next for AI product discovery and citation. On-site engagements are required to maintain loyalty. Relevant experiences are fueled by commerce data. Interoperable solutions are must for an agentic AI network. Finally, test and learn approach.

Retail media transforming

Melanie Zimmermann, GM, Global Retail Media, said retail media is transforming, and coming of age. Brand partners are today very eager to participate in personalization. A once niche channel is now outpacing everyone else. There is greater media precision, greater accountability, and stronger commerce outcomes. Today, the targeting has changed to reach relevant audiences.

One size does not fit all! We are serving every media buyer to unlock retail potential.  The programmatic buyer is now emerging. There are programmatic pipes of DSPs of choice. There is programmatic reach and commerce precision. We are creating a connected ecosystem today. 

The Indian market is very vibrant. They build their own tools, and doing phenomenal job. They build their own retail media platform, and come to us for assistance in connecting their platform with Criteo. 

Retailers are now evolving their practice as they mature. Retailers are modernizing their offerings. With ad density increasing, rich media formats, personalization, and relevancy are becoming imperative. Retail media is a significant profit driver, and require BI, planning, and forecasting. It is growing with full funnel.

The necessary feature set also needs to change. Sponsored products can be AI powered to maximize coverage, relevancy, and optimization. For onsite display, AI-driven personalized and outcome-oriented display ads with flexible pricing and self-service options are coming up. For offsite display, there is full-funnel, outcome-oriented, with enhanced closed-loop reporting. With advances in AI, there is greater scope for personalized advertising. 

Expectations from the media buyers are increasing. Cross-retailer media buy should be easier. Self-service is a must-have. AI expectations are now heightened. Creative must become standardized and dynamic to allow for greater personalization and efficiencies. Unified full-funnel buy makes it even more attractive.

Full-funnel, multi-retailer helps to get measurable results. Ad formats can now balance performance and relevance across the shopping journey. There can be more engaging creatives, and have elevated results. 

We have a platform built for the future. It is multi-retailer, leading to seamless planning. Full-funnel, commerce audiences, and AI-powered insights.

Madhvi Singh, India Country Head, stated that Criteo is changing the phase of quick commerce in India. We have a partnership with Zepto. They have good delivery, audience participation, etc. Our integrations are very deep that helps brands who partner with us. This partnership was started at the end of last year.