-> https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/may-2026/all-in-on-ai-series-agentic-commerce

Roger Dunn, Thrad's Chief Commercial Officer and a 20-year retail media veteran, was this month's guest on Microsoft's All in on AI leader series, interviewed by Adam Goodman, Microsoft's Director of AI in Advertising for APAC.

The conversation centered on what Dunn calls the “Shortlist Economy”, the shift underway as AI agents like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini increasingly decide which three to five brands even get the chance to persuade a shopper, before a human ever weighs in.

Dunn laid out a two-layer model of trust in this new environment: machine trust — whether an AI agent can find a brand consistently and trust its product data — and brand trust — the reputation and credibility that closes the deal once a shopper verifies an AI's shortlist. He ranked the signals that matter most for machine trust, in order: structured product data, third-party reviews, fulfillment reliability, and verifiable brand authority.

His advice to CMOs for the next 12 to 18 months: treat structured, machine-readable product data as core infrastructure rather than a technical afterthought, and shift some budget away from top-of-funnel awareness spend toward closing the discoverability gap — because in an agent-mediated shortlist, incomplete product data doesn't just underperform, it becomes invisible.

As Dunn put it in the interview:

“What's changed is that AI is increasingly deciding who gets the chance to persuade the human… If you're not on it, you don't get to make your case. It doesn't matter how good your brand campaign is if the agent never surfaces you.”

Read the full interview on Microsoft's Advertising blog.