paulaccornero.com
About Paul F. Accornero
Architect of The Shopper Schism® and the buying-side theory of agentic commerce.
Architect of The Shopper Schism® and the buying-side theory of agentic commerce.
He is the researcher who first established agentic commerce as a formal field of study, with work published in the California Management Review (FT50), Forbes, and AACSB Insights. A former Group Chief Commercial Officer with more than 25 years in the global C-suite, he is the author of The Algorithmic Shopper (St. Martin’s Press, 2027), Founder of The AI Praxis, and a guest lecturer at Harvard. His thinking has reframed how brands, retailers, and investors prepare for markets in which autonomous AI agents, not people, increasingly do the buying.
His authority rests on two foundations. He spent more than 25 years in the C-suite of global consumer goods, over 20 of them in international roles across Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, most recently as Group Chief Commercial Officer with P&L responsibility across more than 120 markets and a portfolio of premium brands. He then translated that operating reality into rigorous theory: more than 25 working papers on SSRN and a body of frameworks.
He built the commercial roads across three decades and four continents. Then he designed the physics of what happens when the buyer is no longer human.
From that single idea, the Shopper Schism, he has built a connected body of work: Agent Intent Optimisation, the discipline that succeeds SEO when the audience is a machine; Algorithmic Readiness, the organisational capability to compete when the customer is code; the Trust Paradox, the mechanism by which delegated AI choice erodes the brand signals that once built loyalty; the Automaton Economy, the macro-level restructuring that follows when machines transact at scale; the Governance Gauntlet, the multi-layer risk architecture for organisations operating in agent-mediated markets; the Great Decoupling; and the Retail Schism. Each names a problem that had no vocabulary until he gave it one.
Paul speaks internationally at conferences and executive programmes, including as a guest lecturer at Harvard, and advises senior leadership teams on the strategic implications of agentic AI. His advisory work draws on deep operational expertise across commercial excellence disciplines: pricing policy, commercial policy, brand strategy, commercial operations, and retail execution at scale. His work sits at the intersection of practice and scholarship, with the discipline to build frameworks that hold under academic scrutiny and the commercial experience to know when theory diverges from the real world.