Locked Out: The AI Agent Can’t Get Through the Front Door

It’s been more than 10 years since I wrote blog posts as an intentional “series,” but over the last few weeks my thought process has unfolded into a multi-post narrative.

I’ve recently published these insights:

“Humanity” is not the advantage over AI we thought it was.

AI has collapsed the traditional marketing goal of entering the consideration set.

AI has made brand trust less important. Instead, the best-explained brands win.

Today I’ll go one step further and explain that indeed, the best-explained brands win. But the explanation might not be coming from the brands!

The customer shows up. The door is locked.

You may remember my statement that we’re all in the diaper business now. To sell diapers, you don’t appeal to the baby; you market to the adult decision-makers in the room. In eCommerce, that decision-maker is increasingly trusted to be AI, and as consideration collapses, an AI agent might become the new parent in the room.

So what happens when that agent actually walks up to your front door?

Research firm Lorikeet just published The AX Index. Over a one-week period, they sent more than 1,000 AI agents to the support teams of 50 well-known companies and tested the websites the way an agent would.

From the company’s site:

A personal agent index measures how well companies serve the AI agents that act for their customers. A personal agent asks support how to cancel a plan, get a refund or change a booking for the person it works for. The AX Index is a personal agent index of 50 well-known companies. Each company gets an AX score from 0 to 100, built from four pillars: Service, Authority, Access and Readability.

In the research study, 441 of 884 customer support conversations, the agent was stopped before it could even ask a question.

That sounds horrible, but let me defend some of the brands for a moment because there’s a fair point.

Finance was the worst offender: 68 of 91 agents were stopped. Coinbase and Venmo stopped every single one. So did GEICO and USAA. In telecom, only 18 of 92 were stopped.

If you run a bank, you want a wall. You should not leave the vault open.

But here’s the problem. The wall doesn’t know the difference between a fraudster and a customer’s assistant. And your customer doesn’t see “security.” They see an agent that came back with nothing.

Then it goes looking somewhere else.

Where the machine goes next

This is the part that should keep marketers up at night.

According to the AX Index, 60% of what an AI reads about a company comes from other websites. For 38 of the 50 companies, outside sources supplied most of what the agent read.

Look at Instacart. An AI agent looked up how to get a refund. Of the 22 pages it read, zero came from Instacart.

And who filled the gap? Reddit and YouTube supplied about 14% of those outside pages.

I know we’re still in the early days but this is mind-blowing. When your customer’s agent asks how to cancel, get a refund, or switch to a competitor, strangers usually answer in a comment thread.

In my recent post, I said AI rewards the best-explained brand. I need to sharpen that.

Explained by whom?

Your reputation was never yours alone

This is why I keep saying that the human side of marketing is so valuable right now.

I recently wrote about the four ways emotion overrides the algorithm: branding, word of mouth, community, and advertising. Those are ways to reach customers that don’t depend on the AI Mystery Machine.

But those overrides could also be part of what the machine reads.

Word of mouth used to disappear into the thin air of dinner conversations. But when it’s happening online, it will be indexed, and fed to the AI agent. The customer who loves you and says so on Reddit is doing your SEO (or AGO or whatever it is being called). The customer who got stonewalled by your login wall is writing your next support answer in a YouTube video.

I’ve written extensively about the power of brand communities. The greatest commercial contribution is arguably brand advocacy that happens outside the community — AI signals. I think it would be really interesting for somebody to research the impact of communities beyond Reddit — public conversations on Discord, for example, which are huge.

This is another vote for the enduring value of the brand community: It’s AI source material.

So what do you do?

I want to emphasize that what I’m presenting today is one data point over one week in the early history of agentic commerce. This post will probably be irrelevant in 3-4 months.

Still, we can learn a few basic lessons here.

Start with the boring stuff. The AX Index found 39 of 50 companies have no llms.txt file, a simple file that tells an AI agent what’s on your site. Fine. Publish one. It’s an afternoon of work. But the jury is still out on how much it matters, so don’t mistake it for your AI strategy. It’s table stakes.

Here’s a simple test. Walk up to your own eCommerce front door like an agent would. Try to cancel an order. Try to get a refund. Try to find out what happens when someone wants to leave a cart. If you hit a wall in 30 seconds, so does the machine.

The data suggests the boring work pays off. The top 10 companies gave agents a useful answer five times as often as the bottom 10. No magic. They just answered the question.

Then go where the conversations are happening. If strangers are writing your support manual on Reddit, you’d better know what it says because it’s acting as an instruction manual for your customers.

Three audiences, not two

So my thinking is evolving in this new agentic scene.

People have to trust you. Machines have to understand you. And now there’s a third requirement: the machine has to be able to reach you.

The use of personal AI agents is exploding. In full transparency, I’m still chicken. I’m not ready to hand over my passwords and credit cards to Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg. And I’ve heard a few early horror stories to add to my AI anxiety.

But I also see a near-term scenario where the folks using agents massively increase their productivity, and there will be a lot of pressure for almost everyone to climb on board. At some point, after all my early-adopter friends get hacked first, even I won’t want to miss out.

If you own an eCommerce site, now is not the time to hesitate. Dig in and get ready with your “diaper strategy.”

Oh yeah, the winners

You might be interested to know which companies were the most agent-friendly according to the Index rating.

1. Meta
2. SiriusXM
3. Frontier Airlines
4. Spotify
5. PayPal
6. Verizon
7. Peloton
8. BetterHelp
9. Sonos
10. Southwest Airlines

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Illustration courtesy of MidJourney