A new purchasing journey is reshaping enterprise retail: a consumer opens their AI shopping agent, describes what they want, sets a price range, and lets it shop. The agent compares options across dozens of brands, selects the best match, and initiates checkout—all without the customer ever visiting a product page, opening an email, or thinking about which loyalty programs they belong to. For brands that have spent years and millions building loyalty programs, this is a quiet emergency.
Merkle's proprietary consumer research, presented at Shoptalk 2026, shows that regular AI shopping tool usage nearly doubled in just three months from 15% to 26%. Even more telling, seventy-four percent of Millennials are already using AI to shop, and AI tools now rank as the fourth most influential recommendation source for purchase decisions. In fact, Merkle's 2030 forecast puts 25% of digital commerce moving through discrete AI applications, or roughly $2 trillion in revenue.
The infrastructure for this shift already exists. What's less understood is what it means for loyalty, and what brands need to do right now to stay ahead.
Throughout our series on Universal Commerce Platform (UCP)—covering enterprise implications, product catalogs, content architecture, and EMEA responses—one theme keeps surfacing: the brands that prepare now will be the ones agents recommend later.
This article focuses on the UCP capability that ties everything together: Identity Linking.
What is Identity Linking?
Until recently, one of the biggest problems with autonomous agent shopping was identity: brands had no way to know who the agent was shopping for. Without that, loyalty programs were effectively invisible. Agents shopped as anonymous guests, and all the personalization, tier benefits, and relationship context brands had built went unused.
UCP's Identity Linking capability, released in the March 2026 spec update, solves this directly. It enables platforms, including Google's AI Mode, the Gemini app, or any future agentic surface, to obtain authorization to act on behalf of a specific user on your brand's systems, using the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow.
When a consumer adds their loyalty account to their digital wallet and links their loyalty account to their shopping agent, your commerce platform is able to receive a secure token. From that point, the agent can browse your catalog, build a cart, and initiate checkout. This is not as an anonymous guest, but as a fully identified member with their loyalty tier, available rewards, and full relationship context intact.
And the data implications go further. First-party data extends to agentic surfaces, meaning linked accounts generate behavioral data within an authenticated, consent-based relationship. In a post-cookie world, that's not just a loyalty win; it's a new first-party data channel.
What This Means for Your Loyalty Program
The shift to agentic commerce rewrites the rules of loyalty. Under the legacy model, brands control the experience: customers visit your site, browse products, earn points, receive personalized offers, and redeem rewards. Engagement metrics, like app opens, email clicks, promotion engagement, and reward redemption, drive optimization.
Under a UCP-enabled model, that control transfers to the consumer and the AI acting on their behalf. Customers hand their preferences to an AI agent, which shops across all retailers and completes the purchase. The customer may never see your brand touchpoints.
That requires a shift in loyalty design and measurement. Agents optimize selections based on quantifiable value, seamless reward application, and preference alignment. Standard loyalty KPIs won't survive this transition. Success must be redefined around agent recommendation rate, share of wallet, and member retention.
What this means in practice:
- Transactional benefits are now the floor, not the ceiling. Agents will find and apply points, discounts, and free shipping automatically. These are no longer differentiators. Brands that compete only on transactional value will be commoditized.
- Experiential and emotional benefits become your real moat. Aspirational rewards, exclusive access, and brand identity are things agents can surface but cannot replicate. The emotional connection a customer feels toward your brand is the one variable an agent cannot optimize away.
- Data strategy shifts from engagement tracking to preference signaling. The question is no longer "did they open the email?" It’s "is the agent recommending us?" Success metrics evolve from passive engagement to active influence.
Practical Steps for Commerce and Loyalty Leaders
UCP requires brands to provide an account creation flow for new users, which means the moment an agent encounters your brand for the first time, there's a built-in path to loyalty enrollment. Here's where to start:
- Assess your OAuth readiness. Can your current infrastructure support the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow? If yes, the path to Identity Linking is shorter than you think. If no, this should be a 2026 priority regardless of UCP. This is foundational internet infrastructure, not a niche requirement.
- Map your loyalty data to UCP's eligibility framework. Define the claims that matter—tier status, points balance, shipping benefits, exclusive access—in the reverse-domain format (e.g., com.yourbrand.loyalty_gold) that agents will pass through catalog and cart queries.
- Audit your catalog for personalization readiness. Can your platform return different pricing and availability based on an authenticated session? If your catalog is static, Identity Linking won't have much to link to. This is often where the gap between loyalty promise and commerce reality becomes visible.
- Audit your loyalty value proposition. Quantify what percentage of your program’s value is transactional vs. experiential, and benchmark against competitors. Agents will commoditize transactional benefits, so emotional benefits are your defense against switching.
- Assess technical readiness for dual audiences. Your systems now need to serve two types of shoppers: humans and agents. Identify whether agents can currently access loyalty data via your APIs, what data will be exposed, and whether your commerce platform partners have committed to UCP implementation.
- Evaluate the cart-to-checkout handoff. When a customer adds items through an agent and transitions to checkout, does the loyalty context persist? This is where most implementations will break first. Test this before you build anything else.
- Start the cross-functional conversation. Get your commerce and loyalty teams in the same room. Identity Linking is the forcing function for a conversation that should have happened years ago: how does our loyalty investment actually show up in our digital commerce experience?
What's Next
The loyalty programs that thrive in agentic commerce won't be the ones with the most points. They'll be the ones agents trust, recognize, and recommend.
The organizations that win will design their programs for two audiences simultaneously: the human member and their AI agent. That requires rethinking your loyalty architecture, data strategy, value proposition, and success metrics, often all at once.
Merkle is actively working with enterprise commerce and loyalty leaders to build agent-ready loyalty ecosystems, from OAuth readiness assessments and UCP integration planning to loyalty value proposition audits and agentic KPI frameworks. We've already invested in UCP-native tooling, including readiness infrastructure and catalog enrichment, to ensure product data meets the requirements for agentic surfaces and identity linking. If your organization is navigating this shift, we'd welcome the conversation.
This article is part of Merkle's UCP series. Read the other installments here: [Enterprise Implications] · [Product Catalogs] · [Content Architecture] · [EMEA Responses]
