If customers don’t see it, they won’t buy it. Food brands have always worked hard to earn visibility where shopping decisions get made. For decades, that meant securing the right aisle, the right height, the right placement and an eye-catching package design. But what does shelf visibility look like when an AI agent is helping choose or even placing the order?
Salesforce says 39% of consumers (and over half of Gen Z) already use AI for product discovery. And we’re starting to see shopping assistants that can do more than answer questions, including handling buying and checkout. Albertsons, for example, has rolled out an AI assistant that can help with meal planning and restocking essentials. Walmart is investing in “super agents” across shoppers, employees and suppliers. Amazon’s Rufus can take a handwritten grocery list and add items to the cart and it supports price tracking and auto-buy behaviors.
This doesn’t mean most people will hand over the entire weekly shop next year. Bain estimates that only 24% of U.S. consumers would be comfortable letting an AI agent make a purchase today. Repeatable replenishment is the obvious entry point. For staples, many shoppers just want “the usual,” and early AI-driven purchases are showing up most in groceries and consumer packaged goods.
What “visibility” looks like when an agent is doing the choosing
If a shopper is doing the picking, shelf visibility is about placement and persuasion. For a shopping agent, the “shelf” looks more like a checklist: the choice needs to fit the shopper’s rules, budget and delivery expectations. While ads still matter, an agent isn’t “buying” traditional merchandising the way a human shopper does. And the agent can’t pick what your own tools can’t confirm, especially inventory and fulfillment systems.
For food brands, “machine visibility” depends on whether an agent can confidently say “yes” to four practical questions:
- Does this fit the household’s rules? Ingredients and allergens matter more here. Missing or inconsistent fields make a product harder to choose. GS1 US has pointed to demand for scannable codes that surface details like ingredients, allergens, safety information and recall alerts.
- Can it be fulfilled where the shopper wants it? Agents tend to stick with items they can reliably get to the right place, on time. Substitutions are normal in grocery, but repeated substitutions make it harder for a product to become the default pick.
- Does the price match what the shopper asked for? Price thresholds and “buy when it drops” behavior fit naturally into assistants. Alexa+ is adding auto-buy style shopping features tied to price conditions.
- Is it safe to pick without extra back-and-forth? An agent needs to feel confident about what’s in the product and what the label is claiming. That caution lines up with the market: NACS, reported a 93% year-to-date increase in FDA recalls tied to foreign materials (Jan–Apr 2025 vs the same period in 2024).
If your product looks uncertain to an agent, it may get skipped early in the process, even if a shopper would have happily chosen it on a shelf.
The basics that keep you in the cart
AI agents put weight on consistent product data and accurate stock counts.
To be “machine-visible”:
- Fix product info at the source (ingredients, allergens, nutrition panels, pack sizes, GTINs) and keep it consistent across the retailer feeds that matter to you.
- Track stock in every location that can fulfill an order (own warehouse, 3PLs, retailer programs). Keep an eye on what’s reserved and what’s available.
- Set clear substitution rules for each channel. Some items are easy to swap, others aren’t and it helps to decide that before a spike hits.
- Keep safety and traceability records easy to pull when a partner or regulator asks.
This is where inventory management systems like Katana tend to show up in the stack. They sit alongside ecommerce tools, 3PLs and accounting systems and give teams one place to see orders and stock across locations. They can also send confirmed orders straight to fulfillment or production, which helps keep counts from drifting between systems.
Katana’s 2025 data across the roughly 1,500 product businesses shows that inventory value moved by 60%+ month over month through 2025, including outside peak season. When stock moves around that much, small delays can easily lead to missed reorders or unwanted substitutions.
Grocery shopping will still be personal for a long time and that’s especially true for food. Agentic buying will probably feel boring before it feels big. Still, for food brands, that “boring” is where a lot of sales live, which makes “machine visibility” harder and harder to ignore.
