Super Bowl LX will matter not just for the football. It will also matter because it is a high-pressure shopping mission where people want an outcome, not a search result.
If you have hosted a Super Bowl party, you know the drill. You want the right spread for the right people at the right price delivered in the right window. This is shopping as outcome versus shopping as search. That is where agentic commerce either proves itself or breaks trust.
A lot of digital commerce still behaves like a keyword-matching machine. Even strong sites and apps are built for browsing and filtering, not for solving real-world hosting problems. Meanwhile, shopper expectations are shifting fast. People do not want to assemble a basket. They want to delegate a mission and have it handled with confidence.
That is the promise of agentic shopping. Tell the system what you are trying to do and let it do the work. In theory, it simplifies shopping and gives time back to shoppers. In practice, the experience often breaks the moment the request becomes complex.
The Prompt That Exposes the Gap
Try a prompt that sounds like one an actual household would create:
I am hosting 10 people for Super Bowl Sunday. Two are vegan, one is gluten-free, three are kids. I want a mix of healthy and indulgent snacks for under $120 including drinks. Deliver it before kickoff. No peanuts. Include at least one “wow” item.
Most systems cannot fulfill this request reliably end to end. And when they fail, it is rarely because the interface is missing. It is because the system does not truly understand products and constraints. An agent that recommends plant-based snacks but sneaks in whey or eggs is not making a minor mistake. It is breaking trust at the exact moment the shopper is trying to hand over control.
Agentic Commerce Is Won on Product Understanding, Not Chat
Agentic commerce will not be won by who has the slickest chatbot. It will be won by who has the cleanest, richest product intelligence at scale, grounded in what is real, available, and verified.
A vegan request is not a keyword. It is a constraint. Kid-friendly is not a category. It is a bundle of implications that includes allergens, sugar, caffeine, mess, portion sizes, and format. Under $120 is not a preference. It is a boundary. Deliver before kickoff turns the problem into inventory reality, fulfillment promises, and substitution logic.
The good news is that all of this is fixable. It is an operational problem focused on data fidelity, attribute depth, and rules that govern substitutions and basket logic.
A Simple Readiness Test for Retailers and Brands
If you want a practical diagnostic, do not start with a demo. Start with the outcome. Ask whether your current commerce stack can solve the Super Bowl prompt cleanly without violating constraints or inventing facts. Then score it on three things:
- Constraint accuracy, which means it honors dietary and allergen rules every time
- Basket coherence, which means it gets variety, quantity, and occasion logic right
- Fulfillment realism, which means the items are actually available with credible substitutions and a believable delivery promise
If the experience breaks, the gap is not AI. The gap is product understanding and the systems that operationalize it.
Implications for Retailers and Brands
For retailers, the advantage shifts from who has the most items to who can consistently deliver the right basket outcome. The agent becomes a storefront. Data becomes the engine. Trust becomes the differentiator. If third-party agents shop on retailer shelves, the control points will matter: what data is shared, what is verified, how attribution works, how the retailer protects the shopper experience and the promise.
For CPGs, a new kind of shelf space is emerging. In an agentic world, you do not just compete on placement. You compete on meaning. If your products are not described in a way an agent can interpret and trust, they simply will not show up in the basket. Attribute completeness, consistent claims, pack architecture clarity, and occasion relevance become discoverability. Discoverability becomes growth.
Super Bowl LX will be a scoreboard moment for agentic commerce. The winners will be the retailers and brands that treat product intelligence as a growth lever, not a data project. In agentic commerce, meaning is the new shelf. Accuracy is the new trust.
Cory Nelson, director of marketing at Harmonya, co-authored this piece.
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