As AI agents begin making household purchases on consumers\u2019 behalf, the Huggies and Kleenex maker\u2019s Jeff Long tells the ANA Brand Masters Conference that brands have a narrowing window to win visibility before buying habits harden.<\/p>\n
When Imri Marcus, CEO and co-founder of Brandlight, needed diapers for his newborn, he opened ChatGPT. In under a minute, he had a recommendation, a rationale and a decision, without touching a search results page, a brand website or a retailer shelf. The entire purchase funnel, from discovery through consideration to intent, happened inside a single conversation. “We also went through the entire arc of consideration within that modality,” he told the Brand Masters Conference 2026 audience. “And really, really soon, with one click, there’s a buy.”<\/p>\n
That compression is the central problem Marcus and Jeff Long, senior director of digital and CX at Kimberly-Clark, spent their session laying out. AI search has crossed a billion weekly active users on ChatGPT alone. And yet most brands are still responding to this as though it were a search engine problem. \u201cThe framework of search is starting to become a trap,\u201d Marcus said. Brands treating AI visibility as SEO 2.0 are optimizing for a channel that has already moved on.<\/p>\n
The more accurate frame, Marcus argued, is that AI is becoming a marketing channel in its own right, with commerce and media budgets folding into it. The brands that understand that are restructuring around it. The brands that do not are losing ground they may struggle to recover.<\/p>\n
Long came to that conclusion about 10 months into his tenure at Kimberly-Clark, a company whose brands, Huggies, Kleenex, Kotex\u00a0and Depend are among the most recognized in consumer goods. \u201cI don\u2019t know for a fact that AI and agentic shopping is going to be the meteor that kills 100+ year old companies like Kimberly-Clark,\u201d he told his leadership team when making the case for investment. \u201cBut it could be. It might be. And wouldn\u2019t you like to do something about it?\u201d<\/p>\n
What followed was a build that Long described as starting from near zero and arriving, inside a year, at category leadership across twelve North American brands. The foundation was organizational before it was tactical. Kimberly-Clark built a dedicated brand discovery team, gave them autonomy to produce and publish content without waiting for brand team sign-off on every piece, and collapsed a process that once took weeks down to days. \u201cWe\u2019re getting content live in days,\u201d Long said. \u201cThat\u2019s taken a lot of change in processes and alignment.\u201d<\/p>\n
LLMs, Long argued, reward authoritative content. Third-party validation, dermatologist approval, Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, clinically substantiated claims. These carry more influence than brand copy, because the model is trying to give the consumer a recommendation it can defend. \u201cThe LLM is sort of like a puppy,\u201d Long said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to recommend things that the consumer seems to agree with and likes. If it gives bad recommendations, the consumer is going to give it a thumbs down. And then it\u2019s going to change its behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/p>\n
That feedback loop is more inportant more than it might appear, because it points to what makes agentic commerce so consequential. When Kimberly-Clark updated the Wikipedia page for Kotex after a new product launch, Brandlight\u2019s platform showed that within 24 hours, Wikipedia was being cited 44% more frequently by LLMs. The speed of influence, in both directions, is unlike anything in traditional search.<\/p>\n
The agentic shift takes that dynamic further. Marcus pointed to Amazon and Google\u2019s embrace of agentic commerce protocols two days before the session, a move he said means purchases being made directly from chat environments will become increasingly common within the next seven months. Around 50% of consumers, he noted, say they would be comfortable handing household shopping to an AI agent entirely.<\/p>\n
That figure is where the urgency starts. Once an AI agent has settled on a brand for a recurring household purchase, the conditions for switching become harder to meet with every cycle. The agent learns the household and builds a preference model, meaning human decisions become less frequent. \u201cI don\u2019t think my job is to convince someone who\u2019s happy with Pampers to switch to Huggies,\u201d Long said. The job, instead, is to be the brand the agent chooses before that preference hardens. \u201cThis really is a turning point where we have to be super disciplined about what our brand stands for and what our product actually delivers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kimberly-Clark\u2019s results suggest the window is still open, but the scoreboard is already moving. Kleenex holds 70% AI visibility in the facial tissue category. Depend moved from fifth to second in adult care in 30 days. An independent e-commerce assessment ranked Kimberly-Clark the top CPG in AI visibility across the brands surveyed. Depend is the only brand in the top five of its category that has grown visibility this year. The other four have lost ground.<\/p>\n
Marcus explained the competitive dynamic in terms that will be familiar to anyone who has watched a platform change play out. \u201cAwareness is finite,\u201d he said. \u201cBrands just now need to compete on gaining awareness on a new layer.\u201d The difference from previous moves is the stakes attached to losing that competition early. When an AI agent is doing the shopping, the brand that gets chosen first gets chosen repeatedly. \u201cThat one decision,\u201d Marcus said of consumers delegating household purchasing to agents, \u201cjust shifts entire industries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The brands building now, Long suggested, are the ones setting the terms everyone else will eventually have to meet. \u201cYou just have to be nimble and flexible and ready to roll.\u201d At Kimberly-Clark, that has meant accepting that the rules will keep changing, that a 10% overnight drop in visibility may have no identifiable cause and that the right response is a structure capable of surfing those shifts rather than a methodology built for stable ground. \u201cBuilding the organization correctly, that can adapt to these changes,\u201d Marcus said, \u201cthat\u2019s the way to continuously win.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As AI agents begin making household purchases on consumers\u2019 behalf, the Huggies and Kleenex maker\u2019s Jeff Long tells…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,25,7537,749,28548,15901,174],"class_list":["post-47802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-brand","tag-brand-strategy","tag-consumer-goods","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}