AI Is a New Customer Category: Wharton Professor & Bodhium Labs Co-Founder Dr. Kartik Hosanagar
Kartik unpacks why AI search is more than a new channel, what it takes to be visible to answer engines, and where agentic checkout, UCP, and MCP are going next.
Kartik Hosanagar is the John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business at the Wharton School, where he also runs the university’s AI center. He’s an academic and entrepreneur of roughly 25 years: he co-founded and built the core IP for Yodle, a venture-backed local online-marketing company later acquired by Web.com, and was an advisor to Milo (local inventory, acquired by eBay).
Kartik’s the author of “A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence” and an angel investor in a few dozen startups. Most recently he co-founded Bodhium Labs, an applied AI lab whose first product runs “counterfactual simulations” to help brands understand and influence how AI engines perceive and recommend them.
He also has a Substack that goes deeper into AI and business. Check it out 👇
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
Kartik Hosanagar wears a lot of hats: Wharton professor, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and now co-founder of an applied AI lab building simulation tools for AI search. Scot and Kartik land in almost exactly the same place on where agentic commerce is heading, but they get there from opposite directions: Scot on gut and operator instinct, Kartik on research. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about treating AI as a customer, the levels of agentic commerce, and what brands should actually be doing this week, this quarter, and this year.
Highlights
AI is a new customer category: Once shopping goes agentic, Kartik argues you have to ask of AI what you ask of any customer: how do we inform it, persuade it, and what biases does it have?
The driverless-car model: Agentic commerce has levels 0–5, just like autonomous vehicles. Level 5 is “buy the shoe and make sure it arrives in a week” hands-off; Instacart-style automation and AI-enabled discovery are lower levels and we’re already in the era.
The funnel got outsourced: Top-of-funnel work customers used to do themselves like discovering brands and building a consideration set is now done by AI, so shoppers arrive far later in the funnel. Discovery is “fundamentally transformed.”
4 words → 60 words: From his CommerceNext keynote, average search went from about four words on Google to about 60 words on the first ChatGPT turn, then multi-turn. Nobody types “men’s running shoes” anymore; shoes show up on conversation turn seven.
UCP, ACP and the protocol wars: Kartik explains Google’s UCP (product feeds today, transactions later), why OpenAI backed off ACP instant checkout, and reads Amazon joining UCP as “testing the waters,” not a strategy reversal
Counterfactual simulations: Bodhium builds “digital twins” of ChatGPT and Gemini and spins up virtual worlds where your site looks different, testing a thousand hypotheses in minutes to find what makes AI answers more accurate and favorable. Market research, but for AI.
The today / this quarter / this year roadmap: Now: audit conversations, visibility, and which bots read your site. This quarter: build simulators and a UCP/MCP workstream. This year: scale it with agentic workflows.
Two front doors: Kartik doesn’t think websites disappear, but “a website is not the right front door for an agent.” Expect a human web door and an MCP door for agents, plus omnichannel behavior where each feeds the other.
Kartik calls himself an "agentic commerce maximalist," and after this conversation you'll see why... the research and the gut instinct point the same direction. Enjoy the conversation.
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.
Or, we have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!) →
Want to Learn More?
Stay on top of what’s happening in agentic commerce, from the tools powering it to the founders building with it by following us across platforms:
Podcast: https://retailgentic.transistor.fm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retailgentic/
We're here to make sense of what’s next in retail + AI and bring you along for the ride. Subscribe and stay tuned!