The Pursuit of Zero-Click: Why Frictionless Commerce is the Future of Retail
Me, grocery thought leaders and two adorable giraffes.
Wanna win in retail? Win customer loyalty? Drive incrementally? Improve profitability? Yes!?! Follow this principle: eliminate friction.
Last week, I attended Hyve’s flag ship conference on the Grocery Industry. My #1 take away: Frictionless commerce is no longer a luxury, it’s become table stakes. It’s a fundamental expectation of modern consumers. It represents the seamless integration of technology + experience. Shortening the path from awareness to purchase.
Reducing the purchase process to a single, or even zero, click.
The Collapse of the Funnel
The traditional shopping journey, a linear path from "saw in store" discovery to purchase, is being profoundly disrupted by digital platforms, social media, and powerful AI tools. This disruption is driven by an intense focus on removing cognitive burden for the customer.
New commerce channels, such as TikTok Shop and platforms integrating tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, are actively reducing the gap between realizing a need. Then fulfilling it. This shift has introduced the concept of Agentic Commerce, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), which envisions a "zero-click" future where AI assistants autonomously make purchasing decisions on behalf of the consumer.
Customers today expect experiences to be highly personalized, timely, and instant. This urgency necessitates designing a connected commerce experience where the purchase process, spanning demand generation, capture, and fulfillment, is entirely seamless + unified.
Amanda Parker, Head of Food at TikTok Shop had this to say:
“With 170 million U.S. users, the app merges entertainment, influence, and instant purchasing into a single experience. A trend can emerge, be commercialized, and sold within days—all on-platform. Digitally native and VC-backed brands excel at this, using TikTok Shop as both an R&D lab and a storefront, while even legacy CPG players (like Mars with its freeze-dried Skittles relaunch) are using it to fast-track innovation and capture cultural moments.”
The Role of AI in Eliminating Effort
AI is proving to be the most crucial enabler of friction reduction, specifically by solving complex, multi-step consumer problems:
Solving Complex Needs: Instead of users having to search incrementally for individual products, advanced AI agents are tackling complicated scenarios, such as planning an entire birthday party where the interface dynamically changes and automatically presents all necessary items. Walmart's agentic solution, "Sparky," is specifically focused on helping customers with complex questions and bolstering confidence in their buying decisions.
Dynamic Workflows: Leading organizations are systematically deploying agentic solutions to deliver scale while supporting dynamic workflows. Moving away from static processes. The fundamental goal is to make it simple and easy for customers to engage. Solving their needs faster.
Operational Efficiency: For businesses like Martie, AI is critical for core operational functions. They built an AI Buying Machine that evaluates up to 10,000 excess inventory products weekly to determine what to purchase, how many units to buy, and how to price them, a scale of operation that would be impossible otherwise. This level of automation drives efficiency. Empowering the business to focus on delivering value to the customer.
I caught up with Greg Merrill, the former Global Head of Digital Transformation at Nike, and he had this to say:
"The customer of the future isn’t just human — it’s a moshpit of AI agents deciding what gets seen, chosen, and purchased. If your products aren’t ready to be discovered by them, you’re already behind."
Frictionless Experiences Across Channels
Achieving a frictionless experience means optimizing every touchpoint, from the digital shelf to the physical store:
Speed in Digital Commerce: Speed is now a key competitive advantage in commerce. Retailers rely on sophisticated logistics capabilities to meet customer delivery expectations, whether that means securing ASAP delivery for urgent items or scheduled delivery for staples. TikTok Shop, for instance, has integrated commerce directly into its discovery platform. Allowing for immediate purchase post-viral trend observation, rapidly accelerating commercialization.
Removing In-Store Hassle: Even in physical retail, the focus is on speed and simplicity. Sam's Club’s "Scan and Go" application, which over 40% of their members use, has a remarkably high 91% positive Net Promoter Score (NPS) because it reduces the friction of leaving the club. Cutting exit time by 23%. Similarly, retailers like Lidl US have found that self-checkout, once a perceived hardship, is now actively craved by their consumers.
Unified Connected Commerce: For CPGs, this means ensuring that marketing content, commerce, and connection are interlinked. Mars, for example, seeks a seamless and connected experience across demand generation, capture, and fulfillment, ensuring brand consistency at every relevant touchpoint.
Traditional platforms, inclusive of Television, are also embracing this trend. I caught up with Nick Buzzell, CEO and Chairman of NBTV Channels, and he had this to say:
“Frictionless commerce is about removing barriers between curiosity and action. On Connected TV, that means giving viewers the ability to engage instantly without leaving the story they’re immersed in. With tools like the Buy Bar, content becomes both entertainment and opportunity; seamlessly keeping audiences on-platform, strengthening brand relationships, and allowing companies to truly own their audience.”
The Foundation: Data and Trust
The ability to deliver truly frictionless experiences is intrinsically tied to data quality and the foundation of customer trust.
The success of AI-driven tools hinges on the quality of the data supplied; put in "junk," and you "get junk faster". Organizations must ensure they have a clean, structured, and consistent data backbone ready for AI deployment at scale. The quality of a company's data is becoming a key differentiator in a world where AI tools are becoming ubiquitous.
Crucially, as autonomous agents take over more decisions, brands cannot risk any lapse in customer trust. Frictionless services must be built responsibly, with careful governance and frameworks in place. Personalization, the ultimate expression of frictionless commerce, requires a true relationship with a helpful assistant that can anticipate and solve problems. Ultimately, reinforcing brand trust even as agents make recommendations. Good hyper-personalization, enables the customer to convert online and/or inspires them in-store.
It can take weeks, months or even years to build customer trust. But only a fraction of a second to lose it all. Build your foundation with purpose, transparency and an intent to do what’s best for the customer.
When it comes to operationalize Data, Lucas Tieleman, Co-Founder & CEO of Optiversal had this to say:
“Data is the language of trust. It lets you meet customers in their own vernacular—how they actually search, speak, and shop. In a world where AI agents and search engines decide what products get seen, truth in your data becomes the new brand currency. The brands that win feed clean, structured, and enriched information into every channel. An agent can’t recommend what it doesn’t understand. At Optiversal, we believe frictionless commerce isn’t built on automation alone—it’s built on accuracy, transparency, and consistency at scale.”
What this Means
The competitive retail environment demands that businesses evolve beyond mere convenience to embrace radical simplicity. By leveraging AI to reduce effort, connecting channels seamlessly, and building experiences founded on quality data and trust.
The winning companies will future-proof their operations and deliver the truly frictionless experiences that today’s consumers expect.
