The Algorithmic Shopper
St. Martin's Press / Macmillan, April 2027.
For my whole career, I sat where the commercial decisions are made. As a former Group Chief Commercial Officer in a major European consumer-goods group, I carried a global P&L of more than €3.5 billion across more than thirty companies and 120 markets, with more than twenty-five years in the C-suite. The work came down to a single question: why people buy, and how a brand earns the moment of choice.
Then the moment of choice began to move. Not to a different shelf or a new channel, but to an algorithm. I am not a futurist guessing at what comes next. I am the operator who watched it happen, and then did the harder thing: I went and built the body of academic work. The consumer who experiences value and the shopper who executes the purchase are separating, permanently. I named that rupture The Shopper Schism®.
My work lives at the intersection of high-level theory and brutal commercial reality. The platforms build the rails. I map the physics of the buy and sell sides, and help organizations redesign themselves around it.
I am the first to define agentic commerce as an academic discipline, with a registered body of intellectual property, a book with St. Martin's Press, and more than twenty-five working papers behind the theory. How an agent decides. How trust works when the customer is code. How a brand stays chosen when no human is doing the choosing. That is the work, and this is where it lives.
The thread has never broken. The same instinct that ran global businesses now drives the research: a refusal to guess, and a need to know how the decision actually gets made. I founded The AI Praxis to build this field in the open, for the leaders who have to make their brands chosen by machines while the rules are still being written. I have stood where they stand, and that is who the work is for.
The Shopper Schism® is the first permanent separation in the history of commerce: the consumer, who experiences value, from the shopper, who executes the purchase. When an autonomous agent does the buying, a century of marketing built around a single human decision-maker quietly stops working. This is agentic commerce, and everything in my work follows from that one rupture.
See how the field is built →The first permanent separation of the consumer, who experiences value, from the shopper, who executes the transaction.
→ 02The Schism separates the consumer from the shopper; the Decoupling is its consequence, the brand's direct line to the consumer coming apart once an agent stands in between.
→ 03Why verification must replace persuasion once an algorithm, not a person, decides what to buy.
→ 04The market-level picture of how autonomous agents reshape demand, supply, and the structure of the firm.
→ 05A diagnostic for whether a brand is fit to be chosen by machines. Covers algorithmic readiness, the Four Ds (Data Quality, Discoverability, Decision Clarity, Delivery Reliability), the Great Value Sort, and the algorithmic readiness scorecard.
→ 06The disciplines for being chosen when the buyer is a machine: agent intent optimization, algorithmic scoring, and joint business planning rebuilt for autonomous demand.
→ 07How the retailer role splits once agents route the purchase, separating the fight to be recommended from the fight to be the place of purchase.
→ 08Strategic risk management for the moment algorithms become your customers.
→ 09Brand, system, and verification, and how the firm itself must be redesigned when an agent is in the loop.
→Originator of The Shopper Schism®. First to define agentic commerce as an academic discipline, documented in a work registered with the US Copyright Office, July 2025.
Rethinking Growth, Strategy, and Brand Power in an AI-First World.
For companies who still assume a human makes the final choice at the moment of purchase, the rules have already changed. The Algorithmic Shopper is about what happens when that stops being true. It is the definitive account of agentic commerce: how the buyer becomes a machine, why a century of marketing quietly breaks, and what leaders who see it first need to do differently. This book is the definitive playbook to gaining a competitive advantage at a moment of historical inflection in the world of commerce. The field told as a story, for the people who have to deliver every day. From St. Martin's Press, Macmillan, April 2027.
For boards, C-suites, and investors preparing for a market where the shopper is an algorithm. Retained and project-based engagements. Built on The Algorithmic Shopper and its derivatives.
Start a conversation →A structured diagnosis of whether your brand, products, and services are fit to be chosen by machines. A clear action strategy to be sure that they are, developed with proprietary tools through The AI Praxis technology stack. Developed from the principles of The Algorithmic Shopper.
How Stage 1 works: (1) submit the website and your email, (2) the engine audits it against the Four Ds Framework, (3) the scored report arrives by email, typically within 24 hours.
See the assessment →The thesis, told live, for boards, leadership summits, and industry stages. Also available for webinars, executive briefings, roundtable discussions, and fireside chats.
Invite a talk →The flagship program is Selling to the Machine: commercial strategy for the age when the customer is an algorithm. Comprehensive syllabus design, guest lecturing, and workshops for business schools, corporate programs, and leadership academies. Delivered by a practitioner with twenty-five years of global commercial operations experience, backed by academic rigor.
Explore the programs →Access the frameworks, the papers, and the institute behind them. For organizations and businesses that understand this point of historical inflection in commerce and want to build on the intellectual property and its foundation.
Explore the affiliation →| The search era | The agent era | |
|---|---|---|
| Who chooses | A human shopper, browsing | An AI agent acting for the buyer |
| The discipline | SEO: be found by people | AIO®: be chosen by machines |
| The winning asset | Share of voice and awareness | Structured, verifiable, retrievable data |
| What gets measured | Traffic, ranking, conversion | The Four Ds: data quality, discoverability, decisional clarity, delivery reliability |
| The failure mode | Page two of the results | Algorithmic invisibility: never entering the agent’s consideration set |
Agentic commerce is the market that emerges when AI agents such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews mediate discovery, evaluation, and purchase on behalf of buyers. Paul F. Accornero established it as a formal field of study, with research published on SSRN and in the California Management Review.
The Shopper Schism® names the structural separation of the consumer, who needs, from the shopper, who chooses, once an algorithm does the choosing. It is the foundational thesis of the research programme and of the book The Algorithmic Shopper.
AIO® is the discipline that succeeds SEO when the audience is a machine: making a brand retrievable, comparable, and preferable to AI intermediaries. Readiness is measured across the Four Ds: Data Quality, Discoverability, Decisional Clarity, and Delivery Reliability.
The Algorithmic Readiness Audit (ARA™) is a structured diagnostic of whether a brand is fit to be chosen by machines. Stage 1 is a free 60 second diagnostic: submit a URL and the scored report arrives by email, typically within 24 hours. Stage 2 engagements are taken on by application.
Five ways: strategic advisory, the Algorithmic Readiness Audit, keynotes and speaking, executive education including the flagship program Selling to the Machine, and research licensing and affiliations. Start the conversation.