Strategic Research Brief
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Exclusive C-suite insights reveal how legacy models are failing and the agentic systems approach needed to win.
Consumer goods companies face an unprecedented challenge. The retail landscape that built industry fortunes has fundamentally transformed, leaving traditional operating models structurally disadvantaged in a world where commerce now moves at machine speed.
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Complexity is compounding faster than organizations can adapt. Millions of dynamic digital shelves, shifting algorithms, and rising retail media costs demand a level of speed and precision that fragmented teams and tool-heavy approaches simply cannot deliver.
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Those that re-engineer for machine-speed execution will gain a measurable edge. In fact, our research shows that companies deploying an integrated agentic system—such as IPG’s Agentic System for Commerce (ASC)—can deliver operating income improvements of 9% or more while building the agility to outpace competitors.
What This Research Reveals
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The Mathematical Impossibility
Rising complexity in managing millions of digital shelves is driving up operational costs while eroding visibility and control.
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The Structural Breakdown
Fragmented teams and disconnected technology are hindering competitive speed and agility.
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The Competitive Blind Spot
Private labels and third-party sellers are capturing disproportionate share by moving faster and with greater agility to target select retail or digital shelf opportunities.
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The Inflection Point
Commerce complexity has outpaced human-led operating models and point solutions, requiring a shift to an integrated systems approach that unlocks competitive advantages.
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The Commercial Imperative
The only financially viable path forward is an integrated agentic system that drives new sales growth while flattening the cost curve of commerce operations.
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IPG's Agentic System for Commerce
The first-of-its-kind system that fuses real-time signals with autonomous agents to continuously optimize performance while exposing emerging trends, vulnerabilities, and opportunities ahead of the market.
The Mathematical Impossibility
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Digital Commerce Costs Spiraling
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To be where your consumers are today requires operating across millions of dynamic shelf placements in real-time, powering not just e-commerce but curbside pickup and local delivery at every major retailer. That’s in addition to the rapidly growing burden of retail media costs, yet the growth in costs doesn’t equate to more sales. Consumers don’t need more of your products just because Walmart added curbside and delivery. It’s simply more cost to sell to the same shoppers who now have more ways to get what they want on their terms.
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The result? A need to manage 100+ digital shelves for each SKU, uniquely for each retailer. That exponential increase in scale and complexity has exposed the fundamental limitations of traditional operating models. Even the most talented teams with AI-enabled tools find themselves stretched impossibly thin, managing a fraction of the commerce operations that could drive meaningful business impact. The issue isn’t capability or commitment. It’s the mathematical impossibility of human-scaled operations in a machine-scaled environment.
The math is unforgiving: 84% of brands on Amazon fail to claim at least one of their top three most-searched unbranded keywords1. Generative AI search is adding another layer of disruption—80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches, cutting organic traffic by an estimated 15–25%2.
84%
of brands fail to claim one of their top three most-searched keywords
80%
of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches
“The Walmart’s of the world have learned from Amazon, and now they are squeezing the brands even more. They’re creating new revenue streams that go straight to the bottom line, and CPG companies are seeing their margins eroded.”
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– CFO, Beauty
The Structural Breakdown
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Organizational Silos Creating Systemic Inefficiencies
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Traditional CPG structures, optimized for a handful of channels, are proving ill-suited for managing millions of real-time digital interactions. In most companies, digital commerce, marketing, and supply chain teams operate in silos, using disconnected tools and working toward different KPIs.
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This is further compounded at a micro level by functional silos within digital commerce (i.e. retail media, content, and analytics) where departments operate with myopic objectives, creating friction that undermines the ability for brands to adapt quickly to customer and competitor behaviors. In addition, each function typically maintains its own set of tools, leading to data and process fragmentation that inhibits cross-functional collaboration. These challenges reveal why the underlying operating model is structurally incompatible with the scale and speed required to compete successfully in today’s machine-speed digital commerce reality.
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As a result, companies are at best updating the product pages of their top 5-10% of SKUs on a bi-annual basis, while the remaining thousands often go untouched for a year or more—a critical oversight given that product pages serve as the single gateway to all digital sales, determining both search visibility and conversion for every transaction.
“The financial incentives are misaligned, meaning you’ve got a digital team trying to sell in digital channels. You’ve got a regular bricks and mortar team trying to sell bricks and mortar and they’re competing with each other and there aren’t aligned incentives.”
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– CCO, Home, Health, Personal Care
90%
of product pages can remain untouched for many months or even years—a critical oversight given that product pages serve as the single gateway to all digital sales
The Competitive Blind Spot
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Competitive Threats Intensifying
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Private label brands, focused on a single retailer and thus limiting their digital complexity, are gaining ground fast by outpacing national brands 3.9% to 1% in sales growth in 20244 and projected to grow their dollar share from 17% to 24% by 2030.
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Digitally native brands, built for the current environment with leaner organizations and simpler decision cycles, are also capturing growth. In personal care, insurgents drove 45% of category gains last year despite holding minimal share.
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In addition, third-party marketplace sellers now account for 62% of all units sold on Amazon7, creating a long tail of agile competitors that can pour resources into select high-value digital shelves while larger CPGs spread efforts thin.
“These smaller brands are niche and focused. CPGs are trying to cater to everyone and end up not being great for anyone. It’s like the Roman Empire versus the barbarians.”
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– CFO, Beverages
24%
projected private label market share by 2030
45%
of category gains in personal care driven by insurgents last year
62%
of all units sold on Amazon accounted for by third-party marketplace sellers
The Inflection Point
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Shifting From Tools to Agentic Systems
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As commerce fragmentation accelerates and AI reshapes product discovery, the path forward requires more than the incremental improvements that come from enhanced tools, even AI-enabled ones.
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This is why for many executives the answer is not “more tools” but an integrated, cross-functional system capable of operating at machine speed—one that can automate optimization of product listings, media strategies, assortment decisions, and search positioning across every retailer and millions of digital shelves, aligning every commerce-related front-office function to shared financial outcomes. In fact, McKinsey estimates that by 2030, up to 35 percent of all current activities across consumer functions could be automated8—reinforcing the scale of opportunity for companies that adopt a systems approach.
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The companies that thrive will re-engineer operations to compete at digital speed and unlock the trapped value in legacy models by collapsing silos, aligning incentives, and replacing tool sprawl with an integrated system.
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Those that don’t lean into that future will find themselves systematically outmaneuvered by faster, leaner competitors.
“Tools today don’t solve the systemic challenge. You need a foundational architecture—not just edge-case fixes—to support sustainable transformation.”
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– CFO, Apparel
70%
Nearly 70% of leaders surveyed said they spend more time reconciling data across systems than acting on it.
The Commercial Imperative
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Building A Competitive and Financial Advantage
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Leaders described a reality where teams are constantly firefighting—managing media, product content, assortment, and supply decisions across thousands of constantly shifting shelves— without the infrastructure to do it at speed.
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In this environment, every delay has a cost. Search rankings shift daily, digitally native competitors react continuously, and consumer behavior is influenced in real time by social trends, search trends, and shopper reviews. The companies that take months to respond are ceding ground to those that can adjust in hours.
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This is why the companies that make the shift to agentic commerce systems will unlock transformational advantages.
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By automating optimization across millions of digital touchpoints, they can drive measurable sales growth while simultaneously flattening their cost curve, enabling them to achieve more with existing resources rather than constantly scaling headcount.
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Agentic systems can also deliver unprecedented competitive agility, enabling brands to respond to market shifts in hours rather than months, capitalize on emerging trends before competitors notice them, and continuously optimize performance based on real-time consumer behavior. The result is a compounding advantage: higher sales, lower and more scalable costs, and greater agility, all while freeing strategic teams to focus on innovation rather than operational firefighting.
“AI is going to help solve the capacity problem. You can reduce human capital and reallocate those resources to other areas that can grow your business.”
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– CCO, Multi-national Conglomerate
+9%
Impact modeling by a world class strategy firm estimated that an agentic system for commerce can add as much as 9% of incremental operating income.3
IPG's Agentic System for Commerce
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Re-engineering for Machine Speed
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IPG’s Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC) was designed for exactly this moment. Built on an unparalleled data foundation from the acquisition of Intelligence Node, ASC captures market-wide signals in near real time down to the store and SKU level across all major retailers.
ASC then uses specialized commerce agentic pods to work continuously to monitor competitor actions, consumer behavior shifts, and emerging trends for each retailer. The system then automatically executes optimizations across your entire digital commerce ecosystem. This is not about more dashboards. It’s about orchestration and execution, unifying every commerce function to shared financial outcomes.
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The result?
Faster, more precise execution, measurable growth, and a flattened digital commerce cost curve.
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Ready to see the potential of ASC for your business?
Contact ASC@Interpublic.com to schedule your personalized proof of concept and impact analysis for your business.
ASC Architecture
“The real-time activation is the most compelling part… that level of integration I haven’t seen before.”
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– CFO, Beverages
“[The system] was by far superior. We pulsed other tools and the output wasn't even close.” ​
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– CCO, Consumer Health
“Combining internal supply chain and sales data with external consumption and share data is the holy grail.”
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– CCO, Multi-category F&B
About Agentic Systems ​​
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Agentic Systems represents a new business line for IPG and is our strategic response to the fundamental challenges facing brands today. To win in today’s highly competitive and fragmented marketplaces requires enterprise‑scale performance and agility that address three core needs:
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Market‑wide intelligence that captures data signals in real time down to the most granular SKU and store level.
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Machine‑speed execution that continuously optimizes brand performance within today’s rapidly evolving platform ecosystems, each with its own consumers, rules, and competitors.
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Systematic alignment that orchestrates all intelligence and activations across platform ecosystems, driving unified financial objectives and enabling real-time agility to respond to market needs and disruptions.
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Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC) is the inaugural solution in this new business line, purpose‑built to solve the core financial performance challenges facing modern consumer goods companies competing in commerce. It delivers measurable growth, flattens the cost curve, and equips enterprises to compete at machine speed.
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Jeriad Zoghby, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer, Interpublic
Yaniv Sarig, Global Head of AI Commerce, Interpublic
Tom Cunningham, Global Head of Communications, Interpublic
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To Learn More
Visit us at IPGagentic.com