Zero-Click Shopping Is Coming: Ascend AI on Agentic Commerce, AEO/GEO, and the New “Feeds War”

What happens when the internet stops being a place humans browse, and becomes a place models negotiate on our behalf?

In this Commit & Push episode, host Damien Filiatrault sits down with Kevin Williams, founder of Ascend AI (Ascend Labs), to unpack what “agentic commerce” actually means in practice: from LLM-driven product discovery today, to automated purchasing tomorrow, and the messy standards battle forming underneath it all.

They cover the shift toward zero-click commerce, why brands are seeing steep drops in organic traffic, what AEO vs GEO really mean, and why the next wave of e-commerce work may be less about front-end redesigns, and more about building the right machine-readable distribution layer for models.

From DTC Operator to AI Builder

Kevin’s path into AI didn’t start in a lab, it started in commerce.

He previously ran direct-to-consumer brands built around acquired patents, scaled one into major retail channels (including Costco and Walmart), and spent heavily on paid social. Then iOS 14 changed the game by restricting data access, breaking a lot of the attribution and targeting assumptions digital marketing depended on.

To keep performance from collapsing, Kevin leaned hard into machine learning: tracking massive volumes of signals and building correlation-based models to make better ad decisions under uncertainty. After selling those brands to private equity, OpenAI’s launch window landed at the perfect moment for him to go all-in.

That became Ascend Labs, now focused on helping mid-market companies build AI literacy, then move into implementation across the stack, especially for businesses with meaningful online commercial exposure.

“Agentic Commerce” Starts Earlier Than People Think

Damien asks the obvious question: what is agentic commerce?