Meet D-AI-VID: The Shopper Your Loyalty Program Can't See
By Nicholas Bills, 24 September 2026
Marketers spend billions of dollars every year to earn a place in the consideration set; the shortlist a human weighs at the exact moment of decision. That moment is disappearing.
Increasingly, the decision-maker isn't a person at all. It's their AI agent, and it has never seen your loyalty program, never felt your brand, and doesn't care about a points balance. It just follows a prompt.
This isn't a future problem it’s here today. Regular use of AI shopping tools nearly doubled in just three months in 2026, from 15% to 26% of consumers, and some forecasts put a quarter of digital commerce moving through AI agents by 2030.
To see what that actually costs a brand, meet David. And his agent, D-AI-VID.
David is booking the family's annual snow trip
He's done this every year for a decade and without really thinking about it, he makes a string of small choices that all lean the same way:
Books flights direct with the airline he has status on, even though it's $60 more than the cheapest option, because status gives him lounge access and the kids love it
Pays the deposit on his everyday bank's travel rewards card, both for the points and because it comes bundled with travel insurance he trusts
Skips the cheaper comparison-site insurance quote, because the bundled cover has never let him down
Books the family into a hotel chain he's loyal to rather than a slightly cheaper independent property, because the tier means free breakfast for four and a shot at a room upgrade
None of these choices is really about that one transaction. Each one is David spending a little more to protect a relationship that pays him back over years.
Now hand D-AI-VID the exact same brief
"Book our annual snow trip to Queenstown, flights and hotel, insure it, keep the total under budget."
D-AI-VID does exactly what it's asked, nothing more:
Finds the cheapest flight on whichever airline is cheapest that day
Pays with whatever card is linked, with no concept of "the card David always uses"
Buys insurance from whichever comparison site quotes lowest, ignoring the bundle David has relied on for years
Books whichever hotel meets the brief, blind to a decade of stays and status
The result
Total bill: $180 cheaper
Status progress lost on David's preferred airline, no lounge access
Points lost on David's preferred card
The trusted insurer relationship, bypassed
Hotel tier and free breakfast, gone
What was $180 well spent for David, spread across four different loyalty relationships, is $180 "saved" by an agent that has no idea any of that value existed.
One story, four industries
The same gap shows up wherever you sit:
Airlines and hotel groups lose the status and points relationship the agent never sees
Banks lose the "card of choice" moment that anchors a much bigger relationship
Insurers lose a bundled, trusted policy to whatever a comparison engine surfaces first
Retailers lose the same way at checkout: retailer chosen on spec and price, loyalty benefits invisible
The moment the agent is invoked is the new category entry point
The old job was being top of mind when a human started thinking about a purchase. The new job is being present in the data the moment someone opens an agent and says "book our trip," "pay this bill," “buy this thing” or "renew this policy." If your program isn't in the data the agent reads at that instant, you're not in the running, no matter how strong the relationship was a year ago.
This isn't hypothetical. In September 2026, Anthropic launched pre-built shopping and merchant agent designs for Claude, with Visa, Mastercard, Shopify and Accenture as launch partners, reporting carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete a purchase through these agents. Payment was deliberately left out of the blueprint, handed instead to Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard's Agent Pay, both built to let an agent hold a scoped, tokenised credential and transact on a shopper's behalf. Loyalty and identity sit at exactly the layer these networks are now racing to standardise.
Getting match fit
Three checks worth running against your own program right now:
Account linking: Can a customer link their loyalty account to a shopping agent today? If not, the agent can't recognise them as a member and understand their tier attainment, benefits and points balance.
Transactional value, logic and readability: Is your program machine-readable so an agent can understand the program rules, points and benefits? If so, treat them as baseline: agents are built to surface this kind of value automatically, so it stops being a differentiator.
Emotional value: Do status, aspirational rewards and brand affinity run deep enough that an agent can't easily trade them away for a cheaper option? This is the value an agent struggles to substitute, and the part of the program worth protecting deliberately.
Run the three checks above against your own program before you do anything else. Most brands will fail account linking first, simply because no one has built the flow yet. That's the cheapest thing to fix and the one blocking everything downstream.
Where this goes next
David never got to choose between $180 saved and years of status, points and trust. D-AI-VID chose for him, because nothing told it those things existed. The programs that hold their value from here are the ones that get account linking, transactional value and emotional value all readable by a machine, before an untrained agent starts spending on their customers' behalf.
We are Ellipsis, The Loyalty Experts®. We help you find, understand, measure, manage and grow customer value. If this sounds like a conversation worth having, let's talk.
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