AI-powered product discovery is emerging as a major competitive battleground for food and beverage brands as shopping assistants such as Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping reshape how consumers find products.
Retail data and analytics firm Spins is moving into that market to help CPG companies improve their visibility in AI-driven shopping results.
The company launched Spins Agentic Discovery in September, which works as a guide to show how products appear in AI-generated suggestions.
Calling it the “biggest story in the market today,” Spins Chief Product Officer Dan Buckstaff said in a recent interview that AI-mediated search is radically transforming how consumers find products.
“If you’re working in Google Gemini, if you’re working in ChatGPT, if you’re working on the Walmart or Amazon sites, increasingly people are using these tools to search for what they need,” he said.
Pairing shopper intent with data
Spins’ new platform helps brands better understand the “machine-readable attributes, credible evidence and contextual signals” AI systems rely on to determine which products surface and get recommended.
Spins uses its vast datasets of product information to better position products for AI-powered assistants. Spins plots the product information in its proprietary knowledge graph, ensuring that products are “understood, surfaced and recommended as intended,” the company said in a press release.
Jessica Wright, SVP of Spins Foundry, the company’s data platform for agents and applications, said AI is becoming the gateway to product discovery, and brands need to better understand how to influence outcomes.
“Agentic Discovery combines AI visibility intelligence with the product, category and performance data Spins is known for, helping brands turn AI-powered discovery into measurable growth,” she said.
Winning in AI discovery
AI discovery is becoming critical for product success, according to Buckstaff, who explained that brands can no longer assume that great products will be discovered on their own.
“Agentic Discovery helps them understand how AI systems interpret and recommend their products, then prioritizes the actions most likely to improve visibility, accelerate conversion, and grow market share,” he said.
For example, busy parents picking up their kids from school who need to tide them over with a snack before dinner is not going to ask for a shelf-stable product, Buckstaff said.
“They’re just going to say, ‘My kids are hungry when I pick them up. I want them to eat healthy foods. What are some snacks that I can feed them so I can survive until dinner?’” he said.
The shopper might add that they want the snack to be some kind of energy bar.
“Engines that sit below ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity … they look across all the product data that they’re able to assemble and say, ‘Here are what we think are recommendations,’” he said.
Defining consumer need states
The scenario of hungry children waiting for dinner is just one of a seemingly endless number of “need states” that consumers face, Buckstaff explained.
“There’s data out there that almost three-quarters of all shoppers are now beginning their searches with AI, whether it’s meal planning, whether it’s dietary change because of health conditions for someone in their family,” he said.
Consumers are not just simply looking for products, he said, they often want to learn more about products they’re purchasing.
“Eventually, that turns into some form of a need state,” he said. “There’s data out there from everybody from Walmart to Shopify.”
Spins has unique insights into shifts in the food and beverage market, Buckstaff said.
“When you have the proper product data, the number of recommendations that flow through from a ChatGPT or a Perplexity spike very quickly because these models find that data,” he said.
