As marketplace algorithms accelerate, brands are replacing campaign-based e-commerce management with AI agents that optimize content, media, and pricing in real time.
Agencies have filled the execution gap for CPG brands for decades, playing an integral role in content refreshes, retail media plans, and pricing updates across entire catalogs. But now, when AI agents can optimize a product page listing in seconds rather than the half-hour or more it takes a human to do it manually, the retailer-agency relationship is starting to evolve. It has to, in order to keep up with algorithms that reprioritize listings in real time, as category competition intensifies and rising CPCs create a more dynamic marketplace.
To keep up, brands have to replace the campaign cycle with agentic execution, using AI agents to continuously optimize content, media, and pricing across all SKUs and marketplaces. But that doesn’t mean agencies will no longer play an essential role.
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The Agency Model Wasn’t Built for How Retail Moves Today
According to a CommerceIQ survey, 76% of commerce teams still rely on agencies, with 49% allocating 15% to 30% of their budget to agency fees alone. Those retainers keep climbing, while 55% of commerce teams say agency costs are too high relative to results. The agency model was designed around campaigns with a plan, launch, and report at the end.
Now, a competitor can update their listing and take your search ranking overnight, outbid you for the top ad placement while your agency is working on the next report, and win the sale by the time your team sees that report. Commerce teams are already seeing this play out, with 40% saying their agency’s response times can’t keep up with how fast algorithms are already moving.Â
Brands need to make thousands of daily optimizations to content, media, and pricing across a handful of marketplaces. This is far beyond what any team running on a campaign calendar can handle. The demand that marketplace algorithms generate is outpacing what agencies can deliver, so brands that want to stay competitive need to find a solution that will keep up.
How Agentic Execution Does the Work That Agencies Can’t
Agencies pull reports weekly to understand what happened, while AI agents analyze performance down to the minute and flag issues, such as out-of-stock listings, as they arise. Agencies build a plan and wait for approval, while AI agents recommend the next-best action and execute it within the brand’s guardrails. Agencies manually update listings one at a time, while AI agents adjust bids and optimize content across the full catalog around the clock.
The role of agencies needs to evolve. As these agents take on operational execution, agencies can stop billing for hours spent pulling reports and updating listings, and instead focus on work that requires a human touch.Â
AI agents paired with human experts outperform traditional agency and SaaS workflows by 10x to 100x in speed and operational scale. While agencies are limited by human capacity and business hours, agents execute continuously across every marketplace where a brand is present. This looks like multiple agents that operate within defined guardrails and are trained on brand-specific context:
- A content agent identifies and resolves PDP gaps at scale.Â
- A media agent improves iROAS via thousands of optimizations a day.
- A sales agent flags performance risks before they show up in a quarterly review.Â
This scale of execution changes what’s possible at the catalog level. Agency-led teams can typically manage only the top 20% of a brand’s catalog, so the hero SKUs get the most attention, while the rest sit untouched, with unoptimized content, stale pricing, and missed media opportunities. Agentic execution covers 100% of SKUs without incurring the agency-hour scaling costs.
Agencies continue to add value through creative strategy, brand positioning, and integrated campaigns, while agents handle the operational work that never stops and that no agency can manually keep up with at scale.
Also Read: E-commerce Doesn’t Have a Data Problem. It Has a Speed One.
How the Agency-Led Model Is Evolving
The role agencies play in e-commerce is changing. Brands that still rely on them to manage their catalogs are spending more each year to cover only a small percentage of SKUs.
Meanwhile, the brands recognizing this early are rebuilding their ecommerce operations around continuous agentic execution and are already optimizing their full catalog across every marketplace at a speed and scale the old model isn’t set up to handle.
