For most of eCommerce history, the shopper was a person with a browser.

Moving forward, the shopper will increasingly be an AI agent that can research options, compare prices and policies, apply discounts, authenticate accounts, and complete a checkout, often without ever visiting a storefront in the traditional sense.

That shift doesn’t just change UX. It changes power.

When an AI agent becomes the interface, brands risk being reduced to interchangeable line items in a response: “Here are three options. The best value is….” And when value is computed in real time, the brands that win won’t just be the ones with the lowest price. They’ll be the ones with the strongest, most legible, most portable customer relationship.

That’s why loyalty programs are no longer an engagement or retention strategy. In AI commerce, they become infrastructure.

AI commerce is becoming standardized and loyalty is in the spec

Two signals matter here:

• Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), developed with Shopify and other ecosystem partners, is positioned as an open standard that let conversational shopping interfaces interact with merchant backends in a consistent way to cover building blocks like discovery, identity linking, checkout, and execution.
• OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) similarly describes an open standard to let buyers, agents, and businesses complete purchases by reasoning over structured state and invoking tools during the flow.

The specific standards will evolve, but the directional truth won’t This means agents need structured, machine-readable commerce.

Importantly, loyalty and promotions aren’t nice-to-haves in this future; they’re part of what the agent will consider when calculating the consumer’s best outcome.

In UCP, promotions are already modelled as an extension to checkout, where merchants can provide discount data that agents can display and apply. And when you combine promotions with identity linking, loyalty stops being marketing and instead becomes an agent-native capability with focuses on authenticating the customer, retrieving entitlements, and applying member rewards, perks and benefits.

Why loyalty becomes critical when the interface is an AI

1) Loyalty is your identity layer in a world without stable identity

AI agents can’t guess who the shopper is. They can only act on verified identity, consent, and permissions.

That’s why standards like UCP emphasize identity linking; a secure way to associate a user with their merchant account so an agent can access member-only pricing, earn benefits, and redeem rewards.

In practice, that means your loyalty program account becomes:

• the authentication handshake for agent-led shopping
• the entitlement ledger across status, points, credits, stamps, tier benefits, credit, cashback, and more, and
• the policy wrapper, covering what the agent is allowed to do on the customer’s behalf

If your loyalty program delivers poor value, is undifferentiated and fragmented, and/or is not accessible in real time, the agent cannot reliably use it. The outcome is that you’ll lose one of the biggest reasons a customer would prefer you over an alternative.

Concerning, your core offer may not be presented as an alternative at all because the agent doesn’t perceive the value provided by the loyalty program as compelling as alternatives.

2) Loyalty is the cleanest source of first-party value signals for AI personalization

Personalization is moving from segmentation to real-time decisioning, and it’s being accelerated by AI.

At Loyalty & Reward Co, we repeatedly highlight to our clients how strongly consumers expect personalization, and how quickly frustration rises when it isn’t delivered.

But AI-powered personalization has an input problem; data quality, permissions, and context.

Loyalty programs are one of the most scalable ways to collect:

• first-party behavioral data (purchases, recency, frequency, categories)
• zero-party preference data (explicitly shared preferences)
• consented channels (email, app, SMS, wallet)

This is exactly the kind of reliable signal agents and AI decisioning engines can use because it’s more structured and permissioned than third-party data. And with cookie uncertainty still complicating consistent identification, loyalty becomes even more strategically important as a durable, opt-in identity anchor.

3) Loyalty is how you stay preferred when the agent is optimizing

Here’s the uncomfortable truth; when agents shop, they optimize for a goal function. This may be price, delivery speed, reliability, sustainability preferences, brand affinity, warranty, returns, and/or member benefits. The brand story matters, but the agent needs it expressed as computable facts.

UCP’s own framing makes this explicit, whereby the protocol is designed to reduce friction across the journey and ensure consumers get the best value inclusive of their member benefits.

Because if this, loyalty isn’t just about keeping customers in a UCP world. It’s about staying inside the agent’s best answer.

Without loyalty, companies compete mainly on price, convenience, range, service and other hygiene factors. With loyalty, companies compete on total value, including rewards, enjoyment, delight and emotional-engagement elements (providing a sense of belonging and exclusivity). These rich value elements can be encoded so an agent can see it.

Loyalty & Reward Co market research underscores how consequential loyalty already is for stimulating desirable behavior. High percentages of consumers are significantly more likely to recommend or keep buying from brands with attractive, best-practice loyalty programs.

At the same time, loyalty program saturation is real, with most consumers holding 5-15 memberships, meaning loyalty must actually earn its place through differentiated value.

Which brings us to the hard part.

Most current loyalty program are not automatically going to translate to the loyalty program AI commerce needs. A loyalty program may be successful in today’s retail and digital channels but still fail in agent-led commerce for one simple reason; AI agents don’t cope well with chaos.

UCP analysis points to a reality many enterprises know too well; incentives are scattered across ERP pricing rules, POS systems syncing overnight, ecommerce promo logic, and CRM-driven targeted offers running independently.

That fragmentation is annoying for humans, but for agents, it’s fatal. Agents can only apply loyalty benefits if rules and balances are consistent across channels, available in real time, explainable (“why am I eligible?”) and machine-readable.

The big loyalty question in AI commerce becomes whether an agent can reliably understand, verify, and apply loyalty program rewards and benefits in the moment of purchase, no matter where that purchase happens.

The new mandate is that loyalty must be centralized, structured, and agent-readable

The most practical UCP/loyalty program analysis takeaway is not to adopt this one protocol immediately. Instead, it is to recognize the need to separate incentive decisioning from incentive execution.

UCP intentionally draws a boundary whereby the protocol handles execution plumbing, while merchants retain control over business logic. This means you can innovate on loyalty strategy without hard-coding it into an agent or marketplace surface.

This is the loyalty manager’s opportunity to become an architect.

A loyalty playbook for AI commerce

1) Build a single source of truth for incentives

If promotions and loyalty live in multiple systems, agent integration will become challenging. A need will exist centralize (or unify via a decision layer) so every channel (web, app, store, call center, and agent surfaces) accessed  the same answer for eligibility, stacking rules, reward availability, member pricing & perks, expiration, exclusions and more.

This is the difference between loyalty as a campaign and loyalty as a capability.

2) Make loyalty benefits computable, not just communicable

Agents can’t act on a banner that says “Members save more!”

They need structured benefit definitions, such as member-only price (by SKU/category), free shipping thresholds (by tier), redeemable rewards mapped to checkout primitives (discount, credit, gift), and earn rules tied to identities and eligible actions

UCP’s early promotions model is deliberately basic. It only covers scope, type, redemption method, and stacking. Despite this, it’s a clear signal of the direction everything is heading that will require incentives to be expressible as data.

3) Treat identity linking as a strategic growth lever

Identity linking isn’t just security. It’s how loyalty becomes portable across the agent ecosystem.

When customers can link identity, agents can earn points/miles/credit/stamps/status credits/cashback automatically, redeem rewards automatically, and surface eligible offers with an explanation of how to qualify.  

Specific to the last point, the agent doesn’t just apply value, but has the capability to coach the customer toward value at the point of decision.

4) Design loyalty value that survives best price comparisons

If your loyalty program is basically free shipping, discounting, and occasional coupons (yawn), an AI agent will treat you as interchangeable because so many of your many competitors will all look identical (further yawn).

Loyalty & Reward Co explicitly advise our clients that undifferentiated benefits fail to create a feeling of being valued, while differentiated, stimulating loyalty programs make a brand shine.

In AI commerce, the loyalty programs that remain defensible will include benefits that are harder to copy or compute purely as price. These include priority access, exclusive event access, experiential rewards, refined services, partnerships that expand earn/burn utility, and status recognition that feels human, not just transactional.

In other word, benefits that change the experience, not just the total price.

5) Prepare for agent-driven arbitrage and governance

If agents can find and stack offers quickly, loopholes will be exploited faster too, sometimes unintentionally.

That means loyalty programs must mature operationally by applying stricter eligibility definitions, real-time fraud and abuse detection, clear guardrails on stacking and redemption, and monitoring for unusual agent-led patterns.

The more automated shopping becomes, the more important it is that incentive logic is both flexible and governed.

In conclusion

AI commerce will not make loyalty program less important, but more important. Why? Because loyalty is one of the few scalable ways to establish identity and entitlements in agent-led journeys, feed AI personalization with permissioned first-party signals, encode differentiated value in a way agents can evaluate, and maintain a direct customer relationship when the interface shifts away from brand-owned channels.

Protocols like UCP and ACP are basically the warning flare. More sophisticated rails are being laid now.

Brands that treat loyalty as core commerce infrastructure (centralized, structured, real-time, and explainable) will be the ones that remain preferred when the shopper is no longer a human with a tab open, but an AI optimizing the next purchase on their behalf.

If you loyalty program is non-existent or substandard, let’s talk lest you fall even further behind. The future just arrived. Embrace it.