Construct, Interrupted: How NIQ's Liz Buchanan Is Preparing for an Agentic Commerce Era
Brands and retailers already face a gauntlet when building data strategies, but agentic commerce is poised to pour rocket fuel on these challenges. Not only will it alter seller and buyer discoverability, but it could even reshape the industry's fundamental definition of “category.”
For NIQ, the moment represents an opportunity and responsibility to play a leading role in helping build retail and CPG data foundations, as well as advance the types of product data required to inform and train AI models.
At FMI Midwinter last month, Liz Buchanan, NIQ president of North America, talked through some of the consumer intelligence company's priorities heading into 2026. The event, a longtime destination for executives at top-tier retailers and CPG organizations, served as a fitting backdrop for discussing everything from collaborative data strategies to consumer behavior shifts to retail media opportunities.
Threading these things together is Buchanan’s excitement to propel new and deeper discussions surrounding data governance.
"There is too little conversation around data governance, standards [and] controls," she said, noting that many organizations have relegated them to a dedicated part of the company instead of making them a core element of their go-to-market strategy.
See also: Why only focusing on AI efficiencies is the wrong play for retailers
This partly stems from pressure on today's leaders to move quickly, and Buchanan in turn feels pressure to ensure NIQ serves as a governance resource given its legacy. The consumer intelligence company occupies a distinctive position within the industry thanks to its 100-year history of data management and stringent expectations of trust from both retailers and shoppers.
"We've sat in a very unique place to have dealt with a lot of the challenges that organizations that aren't data companies [have to] grapple with, and I feel a responsibility to be helpful there," she said.
As part of this, NIQ is focused on helping shore up an industry data governance model, including through publishing new standards.
"The need for us as an industry to come together and actually think about the governance models that will be needed around data is really critical, because the opportunity for data to be used incorrectly, for the full value not to be recognized — or for, frankly, there to be misattribution of that value — is real in a world where AI takes a much bigger role," said Buchanan.
"It's still early enough that we have an opportunity to make sure companies like NIQ are taking a position as an industry leader to help think about things like data standards, good governance, privacy, data protections, value and new commercial constructs around that value."
She added: "As amazing as these AI capabilities have the potential to be, we know that they have bias, hallucinate and the data underlying them can be opaque. We also know a lot of valuable IP, intentional investments made by many companies over many years, exists within that data. And it will be used to enrich models that create new value.
"So, data standards are a critical step in mitigating the risk of both AI giving you an incorrect or incomplete answer — and also the risk of there being limited incentive for companies to continue to cultivate the kind of valuable IP that will actually drive better outcomes from these models over time."
Constructing New Mindsets
Today's brands and retailers require increasingly granular and timely data signals for fuller pictures of their consumers, but many business processes are still dependent upon data that's updated weekly or monthly, Buchanan noted.
"For us to realize the full benefit of the powerful technology that AI will democratize and make accessible, we have to make sure that granularity and frequency exists in a way that perhaps they haven't been mainstays to date."
For example, within the burgeoning health and wellness category, understanding how product attributes can support a consumer's wellness profile is fundamental. As consumers evolve their definitions of "healthy," pivoting quickly on this understanding is critical to meet their needs.
Agentic commerce has the ability to further and more significantly disrupt category management execution and the KPIs used to make decisions, said Buchanan. Algorithmic buying, already a core part of some retailers’ strategies, is having an impact, but agentic commerce "is going to put that on steroids.”
It will upend business processes and roles within the industry in a way that we haven't seen in quite some time — “at least at scale."
See also: Kiri Masters shares how to brand love during the rise of agentic commerce
And although most organizations recognize that the role of a brand has shifted, relationship-based engagement will look very different in an agent-influenced world. Among the constructs that will be disrupted is the role of the merchant, retail buying and even the general concept of a category, said Buchanan.
Categories in most physical stores are currently driven by grouping products with similar forms and ingredients. But that's not how consumers think or shop anymore, and it's not how they search, discover or engage with products in e-commerce, she said.
For example, traditionally a confectionery brand competed with other confectionery brands shelved nearby; now, however, half of those prior competitors may be excluded entirely from consideration while non-obvious alternatives (e.g., functional beverages) may appear — all depending on their ability to meet the standards the consumer or algorithm is looking for.
NIQ wants to provide an alternative view of data to help with the evolving consumer dynamics related to occasions. It's planning new data products to rethink how businesses can measure performance and make decisions to reconcile this new construct.
Many organizations are building their analytics strategy airplanes midflight, but midsized retailers and emerging brands in particular will find it essential to adopt analytics and AI in a manner that supports both their current and future state, Buchanan stressed.
"We want to make it easier for customers to have access to those flexible views that allow them to both report their performance and have that alignment back to Wall Street, but also [ensure] that's not limiting them in terms of the decisions they're making on behalf of the consumer."
Driving Understanding in Retail Media
Nowhere in retail and CPG is a deeper understanding of measurement craved than perhaps within retail media. As part of its efforts to demystify measurement challenges and advance transparency within the space, NIQ is focusing on helping enrich and improve audience creation.
It's also aggressively pursuing the understanding of true incrementality beyond conversion within a retailer's four walls. The company is working with both retail and brand partners to develop a new measurement product and industry standard, and Buchanan said they expect to share an update later this year.
"The goal is to create a standard that the industry can coalesce around, knowing that there will always be unique elements to every retail media network," she said.
Measuring the Future
In helping organizations measure the ROI of AI investments, Buchanan described a phased approach based on three horizons.
The first is rooted in a foundational determination if an enterprise is generating expected savings and efficiencies from a particular use case. The second is determining if AI is helping organizations make better decisions than they would have without the technology.
The final, and most difficult one, is understanding if AI was able to deliver something that an organization wouldn't have been able to do without the technology.
See also: How retailers like Kroger and Walmart are accelerating their agentic capabilities
"For any industry to go from single-digit to mid-single-digit to double-digit growth, it's going to take a number of these types of blue-sky concepts that only AI can deliver," said Buchanan.
While she hasn't yet seen examples of this in the industry (though, she noted, that doesn't mean they don't exist), they're inevitably coming.
"I think we're going to see a whole host of those that start to pop up — just really novel things that retailers and brands can do as a result of the technology, and I hope also that companies like ours can do in order to help them."
This article first appeared on the site of sister publication P2PI.
